Submit Your Suggestions for Vista

@Micah Harwell, is that a route the Viewpoint team supports? According to recent docs, it looks like they want an additional setup license for the testing environment.

That, combined with them pushing for per-user-login instead of per-active-user licensing for on-prem setups... Let's just say VP is not high on our recommend-to-others software list.

This would be great and very much appreciated
Please let me know when this will take effect and how to set it up

Thank you for your help in this matter

Donna Roudybush
Joseph McCormick Construction Company
3340 Pearl Avenue
Erie, PA 16510
Phone 814-899-3111 Ext. 130
Cell 814-434-0997
Fax 814-899-4278

Amen Brother!!! and I've asked for this before. When we went to the cloud I begged my test company to be updated - data was 5 years old at that time - now it's 7.5 years. Too many changes have been made with the additional technology we use from Vista - trying to do something in the test company would be a monumentous task to get it up to date with setting changes. I even offered to pay for it but it didn't happen. I would love to have the capability to do it myself!!!

Just a bit of input on this. We run on-prem Vista with multiple applications that integrate with it. So, it is CRITICAL that we have several isolated testing sandboxes. Our current solution is to restore our production Vista backups onto dedicated TEST and DEVelopment servers. We do this every morning right after the production backups are complete. For example, we have VISTADB and VISTA for our database (SQL Server) and application servers. We also have VISTADB-DEV, VISTADB-TEST, VISTA-DEV, and VISTA-TEST.

With these isolated environments we can develop and modify our integrations (ie VA Auto Import, etc) and fully test them before making changes to our live production environment. This works EXTREMEMLY WELL with Github Actions (CI/CD) pipeline.

In this way, we ALWAYS have refreshed data from production. We don't use a separate testing company (ie 101), instead we just connect to a separate testing instance of Vista (ie VISTA-TEST).

My only complaint here is that after the 2020 R1 release we now need to do a reinstall of the Vista database and application servers after each production refresh.

Not sure if the Viewpoint cloud (Trimble Construction One) handles this.

Hope this helps, thanks!

We are VRL Cloud so we can't create test servers. We have a test company on the same server (separate company in same database) yet data is now over 5 years old so really difficult to really "Test".'

@Thomas Nielsen, I think (1) is what everyone wants. We can already do (2) by copying the entire database (or restoring a backup) onto another server. (2) is slow and requires more hardware and possibly licenses.

Seeing as how the Vista setup team typically creates "Test Companies within the same database, this wish is about the ability to 'refresh' them without opening a support ticket with Vista.

Please clarify, are you wanting

1) Refresh of a test company on the same server, or
2) Refresh of a test company on a different server, or
3) Both

Money seems to be the main goal of VISTA, not ease of use for the user.

This is standard in other accounting software programs. We should definitely be able to copy our data into a test company ourselves. The test company is of no value without good data.

ditto, need this yesterday.

Yes, also need option to purge test records. They take up unnecessary space when not needed.

Agreed. For a myriad of testing uses. This should be a priority.

I agree - often times one "test" saves hours of headaches - especially when trying out a new payroll setup

Further thoughts: You could automatically prepend "Test" to the company name.

Another critical thing this script would also need to do is FLATTEN whatever groups and companies are referenced (and their data) into this new test company as a copy.

For example: inside HQ Company Parameters you can connect COMPANY A to use COMPANY B's inventory. When we are testing things in the test company, we don't want any actions to leak into real companies.

I whole heatedly concur. Viewpoint, we need a good way to do this.

Scripts to just copy data WITHIN the database to a new company should be pretty simple, as long as we can ignore copying any attachments.

a) Make a list of all VP tables with __Co or Co fields. (including UD tables)

b) Create script to copy all data from those tables, changing the __Co and Co fields to new company number, but don't run it.

c) Modify script to NOT COPY KeyID or UniqueAttachID (this will also drop all attachments)

e) Kick everyone out of Viewpoint, lock it so nobody can access the DB

f) Disable ALL triggers (keep a list handy)

g) DELETE all records with the "testing company" in them.

h) Run script from (c) to copy data to "testing company".

i) Re-enable ALL triggers (from the list)

i) unlock so you can jump into Viewpoint and try to log into fresh testing company (and immediately set it's name to TEST or something so other folks don't get into it by mistake)

I'm sure there are a few other gotcha's in there. Thoughts?

We paid Professional Services 2 years ago to do this but now the data is too old.  We're to keep paying $$$ every couple of years? These are scripts that are already written.

It comes down to revenue, they offer it as a professional service right now, and to give the ability to end-users would do away with that source of revenue... 

There are 219 votes on this suggestion created almost 2 years ago.  This should NOT be "Likely but not yet planned." 

Bumping based on the comment about "keeping the faith" on another case (https://vistaerp.ideas.aha.io/ideas/VACCTG-I-198).  Update please Viewpoint!  Thanks.

We had to pay Professional Services to do this for us as it's not as simple as creating sample database since there are attachment dbs, shared templates etc.  It was a hefty fee so needing this refreshed annually is too costly.  There are clearly scripts that can be run so would be great for VP to share this with customers as part of the annual enhancement.