Scott.Pearce wrote:You need to grab a book that gives you an intro to c#
Or, if you're competent with VBA (as opposed to the VBScript of Jiwa 6 breakouts), VB.NET may be more approachable. At least it still has all the right words instead of endless punctuation. But it is different enough that some people prefer to go from VBA/VBscript to C#. YMMV.
Scott.Pearce wrote:and you will have to drop the "typeless" mindset that VBScript would have given you.
This would be true of VB.NET as well.
Scott.Pearce wrote:Then, you will need a crash course on how our plugin framework operates - I'm not seeing any good introductory documentation on this so I may have to create some
That would have been handy about four or five years ago
when I first started tackling a not-insignificant upgrade to 7.0.157...
Scott.Pearce wrote:You could also gain some insights by installing Jiwa 7 with demo data, and having a fiddle with some of the standard plugins. There are also heaps of plugin examples here on the forums. But I fear you will need that initial plugin framework run-through before it clicks and makes sense.
I second this.
The biggest things to get your head around, I think:
1) Custom data belongs to a plugin. And you set up custom fields in the plugin maintenance screen, not by running a dodgy SQL script.
2) Plugins are long-lived, and you have to restart Jiwa when you change a plugin. You can't just edit a breakout in the sales order screen, restart the screen and test the breakout.
If I had to pick my favourite feature of plugins vs breakouts, it would be that a single plugin can be shared by multiple different screens and/or business objects. So where you may have needed several copies of a piece of VBScript that needed to live in several breakouts, you would only code that once in a plugin, and then reference that code in all the different places that you need it. So that if your business logic changes, you only have to update one place.