In this series of posts “What is in your Dynamics NAV toolbelt”, i will highlight some of the tools i find very usefull in my daily work, and couldn’t live without. There are probably great alternatives to them out there, so please share your experiences with me.

NAVObjectViewer by Gerd Hübner is one of simplest and most useful tools for a NAV Developer, when you have to dig into a database with modifications, that often are undocumented or you just get a brief explanation of what a previous mod is doing. It is a great alternative to using the Developers Toolkit, as it does not require any setups and other dependencies. Just a quick and easy way to find objects with a nice search interface. And yes, it also has REGEX search capabilities.

First off download the NAVObjectViewer from this download link on MIBUSO: http://mibuso.com/dlinfo.asp?FileID=1094. This is the official description of the tool from the download page:

“With this tool you can view and analyze NAV text object files. After importing an object file, the objects are displayed in a treeview (explorer like) structure.

You can enter one or more search expressions to get only those objects containing the search strings. You can right click an object to get those objects which use the selected object in any way. For example if you look for the usage of a table object, all objects where shown which use record variables of that table. The matching search strings are highlighted in the text part of the object viewer.

The tool is much simpler than for example Developer’s Toolkit, but it is much faster. You can analyze arbitrary object files from NAV version 2.0 up to 5.0 SP1. There is a new (commercial) version available which can handle object files from NAV 2009, too, including the new page objects and the extended report format (xml part).

Note: If you open an object file created with NAV 2009 with this version of the tool, it may crash due to some missing carriage return signs in the xml part of report objects.

Version 5.1:
– view, analyze and save NAV 5.0 (or older) object text files
– supports regular expressions
– case insensitive search possible
– pdf documentation
– free version 5.1

Update 30/04/2009:
This is an update with some bug fixes (in certain cases the error “No valid NAV object file” appears, though the file is valid) – and some new features. You can manually remove objects from the list and save the displayed objects to a new text file (new Save-Button).”

How to use it very simple. Export the objects of interest from Dynamics NAV in text format from the Object Designer. Open the NAVObjectViewer and load the previously exported text file. You will be presented with something like this:

Enter a search term, eg. the field name: “last counting period” and it filters the objects list to only show objects where this is found:

I love this tool due to it simplistic approach and the REGEX feature for searching the code. The Developers Toolkit has more advanced functionality, but NAVObjectViewer provides 9 out of 10 times exactly what you need.

Thanks Gerd!