SmartList is a common ad-hoc reporting tool within Dynamics GP, which is used by many customers. What happens when you try to add that one field that is not in the list of available columns or you want that one piece of data that does not reside within Dynamics GP? This is where SmartList Builder comes in.
SmartList Builder adds the power to create your own SmartLists. Here, we want to address the number one question I get. Can I modify an existing SmartList? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is you can create a new SmartList replicating the existing one, with the changes you want and then through security remove the old. As we go through the security model, you will see how to do that.
There are several areas that need to be addressed when looking at SmartList security.
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First, within SmartList Builder itself, there is a secuity menu. You have two choices, data connections and SQL tables. For purposes of this article, we will focus on the SQL table security.
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This is where you can grant SmartList Builder access to specific databases and / or tables and views. You will notice that all databases are listed, so you can add security to other database tables and views outside of Dynamics GP. Often the key to creating the SmartList users are asking for is to first create a view that pulls the data together, including any unique calculations, case statements, etc.. If the table relationship does not exist in GP out of the box, it needs to be defined in a SQL view.
Once security is granted to the appropriate objects, SmartList Builder can be used to create the SmartList. Building the SmartList is outside the scope of this article, but will be in a future blog post.
After building a new SmartList, typically only sa and the users assigned to the Power User role will have access to it. The next step is to grant security within the Dynamics GP role based model.
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In Security Task Setup, you can add to an existing task or create a new task. The task must be assigned to a role and the role to a user. The idea though is to select SmartList for the product, SmartList Object for the Type and SmartList Objects for the Series. This will give you a list of all SmartLists, including the ones you’ve created with SmartList Builder. Add a checkmark to those new ones you want the users to see. Remember, you can create multiple tasks, assigning some SmartLists to a group of users and other SmartLists to another group.
In the case mentioned earlier where you want to modify an existing SmartList, you can remove security from the existing SmartList and replace it with the new SmartList you’ve created.
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