With the introduction of hyperlinks for the Dynamics NAV client, the approach taken was the Running Object Table (ROT Table). From the http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms695276.aspx article: "The most common type of moniker provider is a compound-document link source. This includes server applications that support linking to their documents (or portions of a document) and container applications that support linking to embeddings within their documents."
Im not a wizard in to this, and it has been a lot of googling for the information, so if you have additional information on this issue, any hints and information would be very helpful.
Where do we find information about the interfaces? In the registry, take a look at this key:
Here are the some class names from the registry:
- INSHyperlink
- INSObjectDesigner
- INSApplication
- INSForm
- _INSApplicationEvents
- INSHook
- INSTable
- INSRec
- INSMenuButton
- _INSMenuButtonEvents
- INSAppBase
- INSCallbackEnum
For now i have only been able to find Interfaces to INSObjectDesigner (as they are used in Celenia Version Control), which of course is very interesting. It exposes methods for these functions:
But where is the "documenation" on these interfaces??????
The format for the Read and Write functions are text files, like the ones that can be imported/exported through the object designer.
Currently i have created small installers for code dropping into NAV objects, that uses the ReadObject, then parses the file, and inserts the code, and finally imports back into NAV with WriteObjects.
Here is some screenshots from a simple application reading objects into a texteditor, allows editing, and then writing back to NAV:
Step 1: Read object into editor
Step 2: Find documentation trigger
Step 3: Add text
Step 4: Write back to NAV
Step 5: Code changed in NAV
So currently im interested in finding information about the other interfaces. I will continue this series of post here when i get some decent frameworks done in .NET. Perhaps making a Dynamics NAV Installer project in the open source community would be interesting, what do you think?
Other resources:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/automatingvisualstudio.aspx
http://www.mibuso.com/dlinfo.asp?FileID=776
Not to forget, kudo's go out to Claus Hornbæk, Alexey Pavlov and Lutz Roeder.