Back in January 2011 i wrote about the NAV Launcher, a project based on the Navision Starter v1.2 orignally created by Sergey Gazizyanov back in 2006. Well, i realized that i never put a download link on the site.
Attached in this post is the installer for the .NET project. It requires, as far as i remember .NET framework version 2.
You know the hoops you have to jump before you got Visual Studio setup for creating a RTC add-in. Well look no further Christian Abeln published a couple of great templates to use in Visual Studio, that will help you create your add-ins much faster and easier.
Actually he already published tempates back in 2009, as you can find on this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cabeln/archive/2009/11/16/resources-to-my-add-in-sessions-at-directions-09-in-austin-tx.aspx.
His new updated templates that VS extensions can be downloaded here:
18 days into the new year of 2011, and still wondering where 2010 went? Since the last postings things have been busy with end of year tasks for customers, holiday with the family and here early 2011 a NAV 3.60 to NAV 2009 upgrade.
With christmas time just a few weeks past, i think i know what one of our customers got for christmas :). Well, here is the story… you know for troubleshooting issues remotely screenshots of the process and error messages are always a big help, so our support department requested that from a customer.
Here is what they send us:
Every time you copy/paste data from NAV to Excel, you always run into the “intelligent” way Excel handles data. Excel’s default number format is “General”. Unfortunately this has some drawbacks, especially when you paste in data from another application.
Lets do this example, enter in a new cell with Number Format General, the value “001010”, and you will see Excel stores this as 1010, since it determined your value to be a Number. Of course we wanted it to be the equivalent of a NAV Code field, and expected Excel to keep it like “001010”. In order to do this you can for the field tell it is text by adding a ‘ in front. So far so good….
But when doing a copy/paste you dont have that option, so what to do?
While most children are watching the days to christmas, most NAV people are looking forward to December 15th, when the R2 release of Dynamics NAV 2009 is going to be released.
A quick blog scan will give you loads of information about the new features, the hype and what not. But Microsoft also released these hot topic videos covering some of the new features. For some reason i had not seen them until today where they caught my eye on the frontpage of MIBUSO. Thought i would share them with you as a little advent calendar present.
The topics covered are:
.NET Interop, Online Payments Service, What’s new for developers and a general overview.
As “Dinosaur”-tech as it might seem these days with most blogs posting about RTC, dataports is still one of the easiest ways to import data into NAVision. Having to search my old databases for a quick way to handle headers in datafiles, i thought i would share this with you. Hopefully Google will answer you with this post next time you have to do it :).
If you appreciate these beginners tips, let me know and i will dig into my archives before everyone leaves on the Dynamics Ark….
This small piece of code will handle writing headers when exporting, and also skip the first datarow when importing.
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.
Stijn Bossuyt has made a great function/codeunit for generating barcodes within Dynamics NAV without the need for any third party add-ons. You can find more information about it on this MIBUSO blog.
Barcode as defined on Wikipedia: “A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows certain data on certain products. Originally, barcodes represented data in the widths (lines) and the spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1D (1 dimensional) barcodes or symbologies. They also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2D (2 dimensional) matrix codes or symbologies. Although 2D systems use symbols other than bars, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well. Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers, or scanned from an image by special software.”
Lets go over a quick guide on how to use it.
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.
One of the most difficult errors in NAV to troubleshoot is: “The transaction cannot be completed because it will cause inconsistencies in the G/L Entry table”. In a standard, unmodified database it is usually related to tax/rounding issues. And in customized databases, it can be all sorts of issues.
I have seen all kinds of workarounds for figuring out the data/transaction that causes the inconsistency. Most of them have been way to complicated, doing all kinds of modifications to the posting codeunit, or looking up uncommitted records through sophisticated SQL queries. Until the post by Rashed Amini back in 2007 (can be found here on MIBUSO), there was no real good solution to it.
Unfortunately there is still a lot of developers that are not aware of this priceless trick, so let’s look into how he solved the issue of looking at the transactions that caused the inconsistency.
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.
Using the built-in string functions in Dynamics NAV usually gives you all the string manipulation options you need. But a common request is replacing a special char with a new string value. This example came from the previous post on SMTP Mail functionality in Pre Dynamics NAV 5 versions. Mads from Denmark, ran into an issue with HTML encoding when using national chars like: æøåÆØÅ. For some reason the HTML emails worked fine at my local computer, here with US locale settings, but changing the values to their HTML encoded equivalent might be a good idea to get better compatability.
Below you will find the simple function for doing this.
Today i learned that one of the requirements for having the small Phone icon (TAPI Integration) next to y0ur Phone No’s in RTC, is depending on Microsoft Office Communicator to be installed. But my customer needed the TAPI integration, but doesn’t use Office Communicator, instead they use a combination of Asterisk and ActivaTSP.
First task was looking at the Page, to find out how the Phone Icon got displayed. On the Fields in a Page there is a property called ExtendedDatatype, it can have these values: None, Phone No., URL, E-Mail, Ratio, Masked – and it impacts the layout and behaviour of the control in a Page. Well, installing Office Communicator is not an option, so as the developer you have to come up with a possible solution/workaround. And it was actually pretty easy…
Restoring SQL backups from customers is a easy process in SQL Server. But in order to standardize your logins for the databases, it is easier if all databases have the same database login.
So after restoring your SQL backup, this little script inserts a SA user in the User table, and assigns SUPER permissions to it. No black magic to it, just two simple SQL insert statements.
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