The new edition of this book is prepared for the release of 1C:Enterprise 8.3.

1C:Enterprise 8.3 features significant improvements of the platform architecture in the areas of cross-platform design, mobility, and Internet services. Since these improvements require knowledge of advanced development techniques, they are out of scope of this book.

However, the new platform version also includes a lot of new capabilities available to beginner developers. Among these, the book describes the new Taxi interface, the interface fully composed of nonmodal windows, new search options, new 1C:Enterprise script editor options, and more.

The authors hope this book will prove useful for everyone who wants to learn how to develop applied solutions based on the 1C:Enterprise 8.3 platform.

If you need any help with the lessons included in this book, feel free to ask in the comment section to get support both from 1C specialists and the developer community.

Target audience

The tutorial is based on an actual applied solution developed for a small company that provides consumer services. During your advancement through the tutorial you will learn the basic 1C:Enterprise development techniques for various business automation areas, accounting, payroll calculation, and more.

Why have we picked this particular example?

On the one hand, most of us are familiar with consumer services. One way or another, we constantly use such services, which include home appliance repair, car services, laundry and dry cleaning, hair stylists and beauty consultants, and many more.

On the other hand, the activities in a maintenance business lend themselves to a demonstration of 1C:Enterprise capabilities. Here you find a range of customer services, the need to supply the company with the required materials, and expenses in the process of providing services. The company routines include human resource and payroll management. We can also illustrate the accounting process. Due to this broad range of activities, we can offer detailed demonstration of the capability to create various account statements and summary reports based on the applied solution data.

This book is intended mostly for novice developers making their first steps in applied solution development. The explanations in the book are detailed and clear enough even for those readers who only know the very basics of programming.

If you have just started learning 1C:Enterprise or you are not familiar with it at all but willing to master the system, the book is intended for you. The goal of the book is to take you step by step through the major stages of applied solution development in 1C:Enterprise and to demonstrate that nothing is impossible for an intelligent human being.

This book will also be useful to experienced developers because it will help them refresh their skills or improve their knowledge of specific development techniques.

How to read this book

This book is a tutorial consisting of individual lessons. At the beginning of each lesson we provide an estimated time for lesson completion.

Each lesson ends with a quiz to test your new knowledge.

The book has a brief table of contents listing the lessons and their durations. The lessons themselves include detailed tables of contents, you can use them to navigate to specific sections of completed lessons. A detailed table of contents for all lessons is available at the end of the book.

Each lesson is a logically complete part of applied solution development. Hence, while the lessons have different durations, we recommend completing each lesson in full, from the beginning to the end. Otherwise as a novice developer you may face difficulties while resuming your activities from some point in the middle of a lesson.

Each lesson starts with simple concepts, which are followed by more complex ones. The lessons provide step-by-step descriptions of basic techniques and various fields of 1C:Enterprise development.

The book includes numerous figures and 1C:Enterprise script examples accompanied by detailed explanations. If such explanations seem to be unnecessary or too detailed, you can skip them.

The lessons also include theory that you can either read while you work on a lesson or leave for later. Whatever you choose, it will not influence the completion of the development example that is covered in the book.

"Lesson 5. Theory" provides detailed examples of using Debugger and Syntax Assistant. This will help you to further learn 1C:Enterprise script on your own and deal with the typical mistakes when you work through this tutorial.

The applied solution created in the book is provided as a demo infobase in the book distribution package. You can use this demo when you need to check whether you perform the tasks described in the book correctly.

Since the example studied in the book is quite large, the demo contains four infobases instead of one. These infobases correspond to completing lessons 8, 13, 20, and 27. This will help you quickly find the applied solution fragments that you need.

Distribution package contents

The book is a part of a distribution package with materials intended for learning and individual use.

First, these materials include 1C:Enterprise 8.3. Training version (see the next section to learn about the limitations of the training version).

Second, they include four demo applied solutions that correspond to different stages of the example applied solution development. You can use these demo solutions with both the training version and the full version of 1C:Enterprise.

All the applied solutions are stored in a single installation package. When you run the setup file, the applied solution templates are installed to the current template directory. These applied solutions have been developed in 1C:Enterprise version 8.3.5.1086.

The demo applied solutions should not be treated as complete solutions and they are not intended for real-life accounting purposes. They are merely a set of examples that explain the content of the book.

The distribution package also contains all script listings that are included in the book. They may be useful both while you read the book and in your future work. This is why we have arranged them as a 1C:Enterprise text template file Examples.st.

You can attach this file to any configuration.

To attach the file

1. In Designer, on the Tools menu, click Text templates.
2. In the Text templates window, click Actions and then click Template Setup.
3. In the Template settings window, click the Add button (fig. 0.1).

 
Fig. 0.1. Attaching the templates

The script fragments are grouped by lessons (fig. 0.2).

 
Fig. 0.2. Script fragments as templates

For each script fragment, its number in the book serves as a keyword that will be replaced by the template content. You can have those numbers replaced automatically as you type (provided that you enable the autoreplacement feature), or you can replace typed numbers manually by pressing Ctrl+Q.

To enable autoreplacement

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click the Modules tab.
3. Click the Edit tab.
4. In the Autoreplacement list, select Enable.

You can also drag any text template to any location in a module.

The distribution package also includes the Pictures folder. It contains the icons that will represent configuration subsystems in your applied solution.

Limitations of the training platform version

The training version of the platform has some limitations that will affect execution of some examples provided in the book. There are few limitations and none of them are critical, but they should be mentioned anyway.

In lesson 22 you will create a list of software users. The training version of the platform does not support setting user passwords and using operating system authentication. But this is not vital for studying because you will still be able to run the software on behalf of each of these users. However, the users will not have passwords.

Lesson 24 covers data exchange. The training version of the platform will not let you test the second part of the example (the distributed infobase). But you will be able to fully study the first, more general part (the universal exchange mechanism).