Jan 20

This morning i was reading the blog post from Arend-Jan Kaufmann regarding opening Classic databases with the correct executable version. You can see his blog post here:

Suggestion for Available Databases Form in Dynamics NAV

It reminded me of a tool i basically use on a daily basis, as well as many other people in my company. It is an extended version of the Navision Starter v1.2 orignally created by Sergey Gazizyanov back in 2006. I have added support for the latest version, as well as shell integration for native databases (*.fdb), so you just double click on the FDB file.

The launcher will determine the database version from both SQL and native databases, and choose the right client executable to open the database with. It also can do automated login with database login, by using a default password like sa/sa.

See here for a quick overview…
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Nov 30

Thanks to Microsoft Reporting Services PDF Rendering Extension, all RTC reports can be exported to PDF. At least that is benefit coming back to us, while struggling with the report creations (read post from Alex Chow: How to define Set/GetData).

In order to get the PDF, that gets generated on the service tier, available on the client tier, we need to copy the file from the server to the client tier. The Dynamics NAV team blog have posted a couple interesting articles about how to move files between the tiers. In this article we will put it all together in an easy to understand example that will give you emailing capabilities with PDF attachments.

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Nov 17

This post is a follow up to some of my previous posts about the Send to Word/Excel features of Dynamics NAV. As you know, it uses a stylesheet (xslt file), that is being read into memory and the codeunit 403 inserts values into the document.

This is definitely one of the cool demo features, when presenting NAV. At this point you dont realize that the Cronus logo is hardcoded into the stylesheets, but think it is just using the logo in the Company Information setup.

My previous post gave you some steps on how to change this. But this can be pretty cumbersome to say it at least. So when having to do it for the I dont know what time again, i decided to create a function that could automatically insert the picture from the Company Information.

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Oct 25

Last week while being onsite at a customers site, we suddenly needed the ability to compare 2 records to see if any changes were done to the data. We were using the Archive functionality for Purchase Headers, and due to some needed modifications (in the release function) we ended up storing a lot of versions of the same Purchase Header, even though no changes were actually made. With hundreds of Purchase lines and thousands of document dimensions, the Purchase Header/Line/Dimension Archive tables were suddenly almost 50% of the total database size!

So we needed to compare 2 records during runtime, to see if they are identical before actually doing the archiving. This brings us to the subject of this post, were i will go into the details of how we did this in Dynamics NAV.

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Oct 06

Yesterdays post on assigning MenuSuite Menu’s programatically got a lot of hits, and i have been getting a couple of emails about how to create the data for the blob field. In this post I will show how to build the BLOB generator i Dynamics NAV.

The BLOB content is reverse engineered on Mayank’s Extreme Engineering blog.

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Oct 02

After switching blogging software, due to a server crash i never really got the old posts reposted from the original blog. I have had a lot of requests for one particular post: Dynamics NAV and the ROT table. I started finding the old backup of the database, to restore the post and realized it is almost 3 years old. Cant believe how fast times goes by. But after reading the very interesting post from Waldo about their new tool ReVision i came to think of this old post. (unfortunately i will not be at Directions in San Diego myself, even though i just live a couple of hours from there! But i hope to get some updates from people seeing the tool demonstrated!).

Basically what the post was about was the features of Rolling Object Table, a feature that allows Windows programs to publish “interfaces” to some of it internal features – i dont know it this is the correct description of it though :). Dynamics NAV is exposing some methods to read/write objects through the client, as well as querying forms and getting other data from the client. Since my original post, there has been quite a few additional blogs featuring the technology. We (see kudos section at the bottom) were playing around with the .NET Reflector tool, and used it on one of Celenia Version Controls dll’s. I had the same features as used in the Developers Toolkit for importing/exporting objects from the running client.

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Sep 22

Yet another…! As a regular Dynamics NAV blog reader i am sure you have seen this before, in various flavors, but here is a simple yet powerful splash screen. The main purpose of this splash screen, has been to easily identify development, test and live database configurations, and also show information about the current object version in the database.

Download the object from the download section, and see this quick tutorial on how to check for various parameters used in the splash screen, such as:

  • Compare current database name with live database name, to identify live database
  • Show custom version tag
  • Show warning for modified objects

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Sep 16

Since Dynamics NAV version 5, when RIM was introduced there has been the functionality for Data Migration and Master Data Templates. I have never really used the Migration tool, as it just seemed to be too limited, compared to what you can accomplish with standard dataports. During my last go-live the customer was using the Master Data Templates, which is a nice little tool – still with a lot of limitations.

The usages I have seen of the tool has primarily been around the common master data tables, such as Customer, Vendor and Items. Often there are some confusion around templates used for Customers, as there are “Data Templates” (generic templates) and “Customer Templates” (customer specific templates used from Contacts / Relationship Management).

Lets get into some details, (in the classic client): Continue reading »

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Jul 08

As a NAV developer there are basically only 2 books to live by:

  1. Application Designers Guide
    (Also available in the F1 Online Help in the application)
  2. C/AL Programming Guide
    (Programming-, Naming-, Numbering-conventions in NAV)

These books should be mandatory reading by any developer/person doing development, but real world experience unfortunately shows they aren’t. Even for ISV products you see some scary interesting examples.
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