Configuration

In the last video we finished installing the File Drag and Drop bundle, but we haven’t configured it yet. So let’s do that now. Not too long ago, the configuration for this bundle was a lot more manual than it is now. The bundle configuration starts by going to Setup, then Customization, then File Drag and Drop setup. One of the things I like to do, before I do this though, is to get my folder structure in place. That is, the folders, that will hold the files, that are uploaded to records using this software. Let’s go up to Documents. We have a new Drag and Drop Files, file cabinet, but we’ll come back to that in a moment. For now, let’s go to Files, and click File Cabinet. We’re going to start with a base folder, for all the other Drag and Drop folders. We’ll click on New Folder, and name it Drag and Drop Files. Let’s save this and create another one. We’ll call this Customers. Because we were already in the Drag and Drop folder when we created this, it defaulted to the correct location. You might notice we have all the standard folder controls here. So, we could place restrictions on this folder. This could be used to allow some employees, and prevent others, from using the drag and drop functionality. Let’s save this and create one more folder. We’ll name this one Sales Orders. Because we were in the Customer subfolder, the location is incorrect. Let’s fix that. We’ll just change this to Drag and Drop Files, and click Save. Now we have two folders, one called Customers, and one called Sales Orders, that are both inside our Drag and Drop Files. My recommendation is to use a structure like this, as it allows you to easily keep your file attachments in a logical order. These are the two record types we are going to enable Drag and Drop for, but if there were more, we would add folders for them here too. Now we can go back to Setup, then Customization, and Click File Drag and Drop Setup. The bundle defaults to being enabled, but if you ever wanted to disable it all together, you could come here and uncheck this box. We have an option to set a Global Destination Folder. If we set this, Drag and Drop will be enabled for all supported records in the system. There are a number of problems with this though. Not the least of which is that, setting it up this way will likely cause files to be overwritten, in most cases. So I recommend you leave this blank, and that’s what we’ll do. We should set an Error Message Recipient. If you’re watching this video because you are the one doing the install and config, that person is probably you. I’ll set this to me. If you don’t choose a recipient here, then emails will be sent to all account administrators, if there is an error with Drag and Drop. You might be tempted to click the number 2 bubble. This will take you to the next step, but your changes won’t be saved. Instead let’s choose Save and Next down here. This is where we tell the system what records we want file drag and drop to work on. We’ll click New File Drag and Drop Record Type. Let’s select Customers. We’ll choose a folder in the popup window. We’ll select the Customer folder we created earlier and click Choose Folder. If we left the setup like this, then every customers files would go to the same folder. This could quickly become a problem though. Suppose we had two customers that both had files named “Important Contract”. When we uploaded the second file it would overwrite the first. That’s not good when the file is important, and we know it’s important because it’s called “Important Contract”. One of the things we can do is upload using folder patterns. Folder patterns allow NetSuite to make a decision about where to place a file, when it is uploaded. To do this, let’s click the Use Folder Pattern checkbox. You’ll notice the folder name is now greyed out, and that’s why we set that up first. In truth the folder name is not really used once we setup the pattern. However if there is ever a problem, the system could fall back to the folder name, and that’s why we put it in. Back to our folder pattern, let’s type in backslash Drag and Drop Files, backslash Customers, backslash, then an opening brace, then record Id, then a closing brace, and finally another backslash. It’s important that the case for record Id be exactly the same as what’s here. This is case sensitive. In fact, this entire path must be spelled out correctly. The only part that was really optional was the slash at the end, but I usually put this. Record Id isn’t the only parameter we can use, there are a number of others. This SuiteAnswer article, on Configuring File Drag and Drop, provides a list of other folder patterns. This is article ID 39442. The folder patterns can be daisy chained together, however in the real world, using the record ID is what I have seen work the best. Especially if you combine it with a meaningful folder structure like the one we created. It’s unique enough that there are rarely any issues with duplicate names. At the same time it is simple enough that files can easily be found when needed. And, this type of structure can be used across almost every record type in the system. Let’s switch back over to the Setup window. We can scroll up to show the Save button. But since we need to create another record, I’ll click Save and New. We’ll fill this in pretty much the same as we did for the last one. The record type will be Sales Order. We’ll pick our folder, this time the Sales Orders folder. Again we’ll click Use Folder Pattern and type in backslash Drag and Drop Files, backslash Sales Orders, backslash, then an opening brace, then record Id, then a closing brace. This time we’ll click Save from the drop down. Now we can click Save and Next to get to the final screen in the wizard. Here we see the Summary of what we have setup. If all of this looks correct, we can click Finish. File drag and drop is now setup for these two records. We can always go back to that setup wizard, and add more record types, or we can use it to remove record types if we want to. Before we go, we should also test this out to make sure it works. The last thing we want to do is tell our users about new functionality, only to have that functionality be broken from the start. To do this let’s go to Lists, then Relationships, and click Customers. I’ll pick our John Jensen customer and click View. I’m going to close this tutorial, we’ll come back to this later. In another window I happen to have a document that we can use to test. And that’s all there is to it, the file is now attached to this record. Up here in the URL, we have the record Id, which is 1849. Let’s take a look at our file cabinet to see that the file is where we expect it to be. We’ll hover over Documents, then Files, then File Cabinet. Let’s expand Drag and Drop Files, then Customers. Sure enough, we have a folder named 1849, the same as our Customer Id. If we open this folder, there is the document. If we click it, we can download and open it. This is exactly what I was expecting, so we can close this now, and go back to NetSuite. One last point worth mentioning, is that I am a big fan of enabling this only for records where there is a business benefit. This means working with stakeholders and managers in a business to find out where it makes sense to enable the functionality. Then enabling it only for those records. I find this type of rollout provides a much greater business benefit than simply enabling it for most, or all records. Now that this is configured we can start using it, and we’ll do that in the next video.