How to implement a birthday reminder - Pt. 1

The Contacts (relationship) table in X3 (function GESAIN) provides a Birth date field. We can use this field to create an automatic birthday reminder that is going to popup on login with the names of our business contacts that have a birthday.

First we are going to create the popup window. We go to the Screens function (GESAMK) and create this screen:

General tab:

 Fields tab:

We validate the screen and exit. Then we go to the Windows function (GESAWI) and create a window for our screen:

In the Predefined buttons tab we can set to No all predefined buttons except for the OK button, which should be set to Yes.

We validate the window and exit. Now we go to the Actions function (GESACT) and create an action that is going to open the window:

Here we run into a problem. We are going to use the workflow engine of X3 to show the popup on login. But an action that displays a window cannot be used in a workflow (as you can see above, the Workflow checkbox is grayed out). To solve this, we are going to create another action that will call the above action, and use this new action in the workflow.

So, we create one more action:

This time the template is Outside model, so we have the Workflow checkbox available. Make sure it is checked.

In the second part of this tutorial we are going to do the custom programming and setup the workflow.