Tool for Improving “Mark All” Speed in Contract Administration

One of my users complained recently that, when using the “Mark All” button on the Revenue Recognition screen in Contract Administration (Dynamics GP: Transactions: Contract Administration: Revenue Recognition), it would sometimes take 6-8 hours for the process to complete. This was not to post the revenue, merely to mark all of the records in the window for processing.

Now, in some of our larger company databases, over 30,000 records were being marked to process, due to a combination of:

• # of contract records
• the business process of recognizing multiple months worth of revenue

Clearly, this is not an acceptable amount of time to wait for a process to complete. I arranged to do a SQL trace while the user clicked the “Mark All” button. I found that the Revenue Recognition window would run a SQL stored procedure (SVC_Check_Contract_Revenue) for every contract record in the window to determine if the contract was “Marked to Post” by another user. If so, a message would display, alerting the user to the fact that another user had a record marked to post. Technically, the code was:

• examining the SVC00625 table (SVC_Contract_Revenue_WORK)
• looking at each contract/fiscal period combination to see if another user also had that contract/fiscal period record marked to post (MKDTOPST = 1).

The key thing I found was that this routine was being run row-by-row, one record at a time. Even though the check was very quick to complete for any one given record, the number of records it had to check added up to the 6-8 hours I mentioned earlier. Fortunately, I was able to devise a solution to this issue. In reality, my users did not care if someone else posted the record, and did not need to know which contract in question was going to be posted by someone else. It was enough for them to know “Hey – some of the records you want to mark are currently marked by someone else. I’m going to skip marking those particular records, and just mark the ones that are safe to post.” By taking this approach, I could craft a routine which would work on ALL records at once, which was orders of magnitude faster.

The solution I devised to this problem involved 4 components:

1. I modified the Revenue Recognition window to add my own “Mark All” and “Unmark All” buttons. I hid and disabled the actual “Mark All” and “Unmark All” buttons in Modifier.
2. I created a custom stored procedure (X_OT_SVC_REVREC_MARK_UNMARK_ALL) to mark all/unmark all records to post. It will skip any records marked by other users, and raise an alert if any are found.
3. I added VBA to the window which will call the procedure when either of the buttons are clicked.
4. I noticed that the window did not refresh to show the buttons as checked/unchecked after the stored procedure was run. I also noticed that if I clicked the “down” arrow on the keyboard, the line would refresh. So, I recorded a macro of pressing “down” 16 times (as that’s the number of rows that show in the window) which is then called from the VBA code.

If you’re experiencing slow performance when marking/unmarking all, try using the code pack below to implement this solution in your environment (test first!). Instructions on how to install are included, as there are a few tweaks you will have to make based on how your environment has been crafted. If you have questions, or if this solution helps you out, please leave a comment below!

Download the package here: Enhanced Mark All Revenue Recognition Routine.zip