What's New in 2.0.1.1601

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This topic has information about new features and functionality added in Prism 2.0.1.1601.

• Hide Loyalty Points/"See Points" button for viewing Points
• Long Description Field in Inventory
• Text 1 to Text 10, Length, Width, Height fields for Inventory
• Create Zones when Importing Physical Inventory Counts
• Apply Detax Before Discount or After Discount
• "Cancel Transaction" permission
• "POS - Allow Give Tenders for Returns" Permission Renamed
• Copy Promotions
• Promotions by Day of Week and Time of Day
• Schedule Deactivation, Deletion of Promotions
• Promotions User Interface Update
• Line-item Discount on Purchase Orders
• PrismMQService New Settings
• New Tech Toolkit Editable Fields
• TTK Button on Retail Pro Prism menu
• Time Clock Manager UI Update
• Import/Export Tool Enhancements

Customer Loyalty - "See Points" Button for Viewing Loyalty Points
DevTrack ID #21062
Retailers can control employee ability to view the loyalty point balance for customers.
When the current logged-in user's group permission for "Loyalty - See loyalty points" is set to Deny or Override, the customer's loyalty points are masked with a set of asterisks (***). Additionally, when set to Override, the UI includes a "See Points" button that, when clicked, displays an Override modal so a user who has the "Loyalty - See Loyalty Points" permission can log in and display the points.
Long Description Field in Inventory
DevTrack ID #21737
A Long Description field is available in the Inventory item record on the Misc tab. The Long Description enables retailers to provide a detailed description up to 2000 characters in length for items. This makes it easier to store and display longer descriptions. Previously, users were limited to the Description 1 through Description 4 fields, which are only 30 characters in length each.

Text 1 to Text 10, Length, Width, Height fields for Inventory
DevTrack ID #13169
The Misc tab in Inventory item details has Text 1 to Text 10 for storing text strings up to 255 characters in Length.
The Length, Width and Height fields are grouped in the "Dimensions" area and are used to record shipping dimensions for an item.

Create PI Zones when Importing Counts
DevTrack ID #19679
On a Physical Inventory, when importing counts into a PI sheet, if the import file has zones that do not yet exist in Prism, the import process will automatically create the zones and add the item counts to the appropriate zone.
On the PI Sheet, navigate to the Imported tab. On the Imported tab, click the Import button on the bottom toolbar. 

A modal is displayed for selecting an import file. You can select an existing schema or create a new schema.
Click Choose File and navigate to the location of the import file.
Click the Import button again and select the map from the dropdown.
 
The scans are imported.  After importing counts, use the Merge button to merge the counts into the PI sheet.

Apply Detax Before Discount or After Discount
DevTrack ID #22022
In Admin Console > Node Preferences > Taxes > General, in the Detax section, the Apply Detax setting controls when detax is applied: Before Discounts or After Discounts. This change helps retailers comply with printing requirements for detax in certain areas. A new preference "Apply Detax: Before Discounts" has been added to allow applying detax before discount. This preference will always detax against VAT price and not the Taxed Receipt Price (Taxed Active Price - Discounts). Enabling this new preference will change the order of operations so returning old detaxed item on transaction with old preference will have different discount amount and detax amount. Default = After Discount.
Admin Console > Node Preferences > Taxes > General, showing the "Apply Detax: After Discounts/Before Discounts" preference:

"Cancel Transaction" permission
DevTrack ID #12519
The "Cancel Transaction" permission enables retailers to control which employees can cancel a transaction and which employees will require an override user to perform the action. This permission is trigged by a user clicking the Cancel button on a transaction. Only employees who belong to a group assigned the permission can complete the action. By default, this permission is set to "Allow" to avoid conflicting with previous behavior upon installing the update. Set the permission to "Override" for individual groups as needed. ("Deny" is not available).

"POS - Allow Give Tenders for Returns" Permission Renamed
DevTrack ID #16490
The permission "POS - Allow Other Tenders on Returns" has been renamed to "POS - Allow Give Tenders for Returns. The new name for the permission more clearly conveys its purpose:

• If set to "Allow," group members can use the available give tenders when refunding a return.
• If set to "Deny," group members are restricted to using only those tenders that have the "Return" checkbox selected in Tender Requirements preferences, signifying that the tender is allowed on returns.
• If set to "Override," a prompt will be displayed so a user who belongs to a group with the permission can log in and complete the action.

Copy Promotions
DevTrack ID #21796
Promotions can now be copied. Previously, each new promotion had to be created from scratch. This simplifies the process of creating promotions. For example, when an existing promotion offers a close match, the user can select that promotion in the list, click Copy, make any needed changes, and then save the promotion (with a new name).

Promotions by Day of Week and Time of Day
DevTrack ID #22184
Promotions can be activated for only certain days of week and times of day using the Day of Week and Time of Day checkboxes on the Activation Details tab. Both the Day of Week and Time of Day settings are independent of the base active date/time range for the promotion. There are times when a promotion must only be active on a certain day or days of a given week, and furthermore could be limited to just certain hours of a day. These settings provide fine-grained control for these types of situations.
Sample use cases:

• A sporting goods retailer may choose to run a promotion for running shoes in preparation for a marathon happening on the weekend. In this promotion, they want to only have that promotion be active on Thursday and Friday from 2pm - 7pm. Outside of that time frame, the promotion would not be active.
• A business offers "Happy Hour" promotions that are active from 4 to 6 each day.

Sample Activation Details with checkboxes for Days of Week and Time of Day:
 
When the user clicks the checkboxes for Days of Week and Time of Day, the UI refreshes to display the individual days of week and controls for setting Start Time and End Time. By default, none of the Days of Week are selected and the Start Time/End Time are both set at 12:00 AM. Select the checkbox for each day of the week the promotion will be active. Click in the controls to set the Start Time and End Time.

Schedule Deactivation, Deletion of Promotions
DevTrack ID #22187
Users can deactivate and delete promotions using new API endpoints. This enables users to automate the deactivation and deletion of promotions which are past their effective date/time range as defined within the "Activation Details" tab.
Schedule Deactivation of Promotions
Click the Scheduler tab on the Tech Toolkit menu. You will see the list of defined tasks.
Click the "plus sign" icon on the Task Scheduler UI.

 
When you click the plus sign icon, a screen for defining settings for the new task is displayed. In the screenshot below, the task will run once a day to deactivate promotions that are one day past the promotion End Date.
Enter information for the scheduled task. This payload will delete promotions that are one day past the End Date. Running the task every day will keep the promotions streamlined.
Action end point = /v1/rpc
Action Payload = [{"Params":{"Days":"1","MethodName":"PCPromoDeactivatePromo"}]

Sample task to schedule deactivation of promotions:

Scheduling Deletion of Promotions
Prism users can schedule the deletion of promotions to occur on a regular basis. This provides an easy way to remove promotions that are no longer needed. When scheduling the "Delete Promotions" task, you target for deletion promotions that have been inactive for a user-defined number of days. The user defines the "number of days inactive" in the task payload. Any promotions that have been inactive for that number of days (or more) will be removed from the database.
Schedule the "Delete Promotions" task at all locations that use promotions. By adjusting the payload, you can schedule the task to run as often as needed.
Here is the key information for the task:
Action end point = /v1/rpc
Action Payload = [{"Params":{"Days":"3"},"MethodName":"PCPromoDeletePromo"}]
When defining the task, the user also enters a Start Date, frequency, timeout, workstation, etc.

Promotions User Interface Update
DevTrack ID #21964
The user interface for Promotions and Coupons areas has been updated to be more consistent with other areas in Prism 2.0. While the appearance and layouts have changed significantly, the functionality of both areas remains the same
The primary changes users will see are:

• The main screen that users see when they first enter Promotions and Coupons looks like other documents. Specifically, users will see a dual pane layout: the left pane is for entering search criteria; the right pane displays the search results.
•  The General, Activation, Validation, and Reward pages are now a set of tabbed pages.
•  The Couponset main page has been merged with Coupon Details and moved to a tabbed page.

 The action bar now has a toggle Promotions/Coupons button in the Action button bar to switch resources.

Line-item Discount on Purchase Orders
DevTrack ID #14957
Users can apply a line discount (amount or percentage) to a purchase order item. To do so, users must add the appropriate columns in Grid Formats for Purchase Orders. As part of this change, the following columns have been added to Grid Formats preferences for purchase orders: origcost, origfccost, costdiscperc, costdisc and fccostdisc on POItem. This change makes it easy to apply vendor discounts to individual items on the purchase order.
Below is a sample purchase order showing a 1.00 discount (11.1111%) for the line item. The Orig Cost field shows the Cost before the discount. The PO Cost shows the cost after the discount. The Discount % and Discount fields are automatically updated with the appropriate value depending on whether the user enters a discount amount or discount percentage.

PrismMQService New Settings
DevTrack ID #22007
Two new options to help replication were added to the [GENERAL] section of PrismMQService.ini file:
RECORDSENDDELAY: Enables slowing down the average sending rate of the sending thread in PMQ producer by putting it to sleep for specified number of milliseconds (default value is 0) after every 100 messages, to prevent it from saturating slow queues.
QUEUEMESSAGELIMIT:  Enables controlling the number of accumulated messages in the queue that indicates an "offline" destination (default is 1000). In the previous version it was hardcoded to be 1000, now it can be controlled through the INI file.

New Tech Toolkit Editable Fields
DevTrack ID #22091
The following new configuration keys and default values have been added to PrismMQ.ini.

• SAVESTATUSINTERVAL=60
• MSGENCODINGVERSION=1
• REPLICATIONVERSION=3
• RECORDSENDDELAY=0
• QUEUEMESSAGELIMIT=1000

Prism Replication Service configuration settings showing the new configuration keys:

TTK Button on Retail Pro Prism menu
DevTrack ID #21460
Users can now access the Technician's Toolkit via a button on the Prism Menu. To access the Prism Menu, click the Retail Pro button in the lower right corner. A new browser tab opens and the TTK log in screen is displayed. Previously, users had to edit the browser address bar (appending "/TTK" to the server name) to access the Technician's Toolkit. Adding the Tech Tool Kit button to the Prism Menu makes it easier to access the toolkit.
Prism menu showing Tech Toolkit button:

Time Clock Manager UI Update
DevTrack ID #21963
The Time Clock area has been updated to be more consistent with other areas of Prism.
1.    On the main POS screen, click the Time Clock button.
2.    Upon entering the Time Clock area, users will see a Search screen where individual Time Clock records can be searched for or created if needed.

Import/Export Tool Enhancements
DevTrack ID #21255, 22045
The Export/Import Resources tool (ExportImportResources.exe) now includes progress bars and other indicators to show the tool is running. This provides assurance to the user that the tool is in fact running and gives a rough approximation of how far along the process is.
The changes to the Export/Import Resources tool include:

• Blue status bars
• The mid pane of the tool shows the file currently being imported
• A stop button can be used to stop either import or export