Drill Around Feature for Third-Party Applications

The Drill Around feature not only lets you access data in Lawson forms, it is also capable of accessing data in non-Lawson forms. If you have data in a third-party application that you need to use in a Lawson form, you can use the Drill Around process to make that data accessible to the Lawson form. You can also use the Drill Around process to make the Lawson data accessible to the third-party forms.

Enabling Lawson applications and third-party applications to use the Drill Around feature on each other is defined in the following procedure.

The following figure illustrates these steps.

To enable third-party applications to use the Drill Around feature

  1. Define the third-party file in dbdef.

    For more information, see "Defining a File" in Doc for Developers: Application Development Workbench.

  2. If you want to continue to use the third-party application to maintain the file, set Is View to Yes in the Database Space Definition form.

    - or -

    If you want to use the Lawson system to maintain the file, set Is View to No in the Database Space Definition form.

  3. Reorganize the database.

    If you set Is View to Yes, use the third-party application reorganization utility.

    - or -

    If you set Is View to No, use Lawson's Reorganize Database utility (dbreorg).

    For more information on reorganizing databases, see "Reorganizing a Database" in the Lawson data access manual for your database.

  4. Define an index over the third-party file.

    For more information on indexes, see "Working with Lawson Indexes" in Doc for Developers: Application Development Workbench.

  5. Define the relation between the third-party file and the XX TRANS file.

    For more information on relations, see "Defining Relations" in Doc for Developers: Application Development Workbench.

  6. Add Object Rules to the XX .or file for the third-party file.

    For more information, see Object Rules.

  7. Use the Drill Around Feature to access data in the third-party file.