Hi Joe,
We found the problem! And I think that we may have found a bug in FrontAccounting in the process. Note: I'm a system administrator here at DiscipleMakers who has been supporting Courtney's work in evaluating FrontAccounting.
The problem we found is that reports would not filter by Dimension unless the dimension's Reference field was set to a number. And in particular a number that matches a dimension's ID in the underlying database. So I think that either:
- the report generation system has a bug in that it mixes up the ID and the Reference when filtering on Dimensions
or
- there's a bug on creating dimensions in that the program doesn't indicate an error if you enter an alphabetic Reference or a numerical Reference which is out of sequence.
Does that make sense?
Let me explain a little more about what we'd like to do with FrontAccounting & dimensions. We would like to use the Dimensions to represent people as if each person was a department in our company. So it seemed natural to use the Reference field to represent their name. So the Reference for Joe Smith's dimension would be "SmithJ". FrontAccounting allows us to enter in a dimension Reference like that without a number and displays it properly in the list of dimensions. But obviously filtering on that reference isn't possible when the SQL query tries to find a dimension ID which matches "SmithJ".
So is FA supposed to support alphabetic dimension References? Also, it would be great if it was possible to sort dimensions by the Reference or Name field wherever a list of them appears in the program or on a report. Does that seem feasible or is it supposed to be supported?
Thank you very much in advance for your help and please let me know if there's any other information I can provide that would be helpful!
Jason