Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV

479 Pages·2007·15.196 MB·English

by  David Studebaker

Programming Microsoft®
Dynamics™ NAV
Create, modify, and maintain applications in
NAV 5.0, the latest version of the ERP application
formerly known as Navision
David Studebaker

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Programming Microsoft® Dynamics™ NAV
Copyright © 2007 Packt Publishing
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First published: October 2007
Production Reference: 2121007
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-904811-74-9
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by David Studebaker ([email protected])
Credits
Author Project Manager
David Studebaker Patricia Weir
Reviewers Project Coordinator
Luc Van Dyck Abhijeet Deobhakta
Mark Brummel
Indexer
Senior Acquisition Editor Bhushan Pangaonkar
Douglas Paterson
Proofreader
Development Editor Chris Smith
Mithil Kulkarni
Production Coordinators
Technical Editors Shantanu Zagade
Nilesh Kapoor Manjiri Nadkarni
Divya Menon
Kushal Sharma Cover Designer
Shantanu Zagade
Editorial Manager
Dipali Chittar
Foreword
In 1986 the Navision founders Jesper Balser, Torben Wind, and Peter Bang were
looking back on the successful release of their first product “PC-Plus”. It was the first
easy-to-use accounting package for the IBM PC on the Danish market. It immediately
picked up a huge market share and the founders started thinking about how to
expand the business. They decided to try to sell a vertical solution for auto-repair
shop spare-part management—but they were immediately flooded with requests
from potential customers who wanted to have the product tailored exactly to meet
their needs. Because of this they decided to get out of the customization business, thus
enabling partners to do the customization while providing them with the right tools.
PC-Plus used a database, which was based on the ISAM database, which Anders
Hejlsberg wrote as a sample program for his Pascal compiler. However the database
was not multiuser and if the power went, data could easily get corrupted. Other
database alternatives were either too expensive or of poor quality, so they decided
to write their own database. The result of this was the Navision product, which had
a rich set of tools for modifying the business application and a robust multiuser
version-based database. The product became a huge success with a rapidly growing
number of partners, who recognized a big business opportunity, and customers, who
could have the product tailor-made to fulfill the specific needs of their businesses.
The Windows version of Navision was released in 1995 and became part of the
Windows revolution. The rest is history: the company went international, went
public, and in 2002 was acquired by Microsoft. I joined Navision in 1987 and have
been a part of this amazing journey. Today as part of Microsoft, the team and I have
started a new journey with the product now called Microsoft Dynamics NAV and will
bring the product to the .net platform. Next, we will introduce a new role-tailored
client, enabling us to reach even more partners and customers moving forward.
Michael Nielsen, Director of Engineering, Microsoft Dynamics NAV
About the Author
David Studebaker is currently a Principal of Liberty Grove Software, Inc., with
his partner Karen Studebaker. Liberty Grove Software provides development,
consulting, training, and upgrade services for Microsoft Dynamics NAV resellers and
firms using NAV internally. Liberty Grove Software is a Microsoft Certified Partner.
David has been recognized by Microsoft three times as a Certified Professional for
NAV—in Development, in Applications, and in Installation & Configuration. He is
also a Certified Microsoft Trainer for NAV. He began developing with C/AL in 1996.
David Studebaker has been programming since taking his first Fortran II course
in 1962. In the fall of 1963 he took the first COBOL course taught at Purdue
University, where the first U.S. computer science department was later created.
The next spring, undergraduate student David was assigned to teach the
graduate-level class. Since that time, David has been an active participant in each
step of computing technology—from the early mainframes to today's technology,
from binary assembly coding to C/AL. He has worked with over 40 different models
and brands of computers, over a dozen operating systems, and over two dozen
different programming languages.
Special projects include the development of first production SPOOL system in 1967.
In the decades following, David was project manager and lead developer for several
commercially distributed business application systems. Application areas in which
David has worked range from engineering to manufacturing to freight carriage to
general accounting to public mass transit to banking to not-for-profit and association
management to legal billing to distribution/inventory management to shop floor
data collection and production management.
David has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA
from the University of Chicago, both with concentrations in Computer Science.
David has been a computer operator, system programmer, application programmer,
business analyst, consultant, service bureau operations manager, bureaucrat,
teacher, project manager, trainer, documenter, software designer, mentor, writer,
and entrepreneur. He has been partner or owner and manager of several computer
systems businesses, while always maintaining a significant role as a business
application developer. David's work with relational databases and 4th-generation
languages with integrated development environments began in 1984.
David assisted in script-writing for a series of audio training courses for early
PC operating systems and wrote for a newsletter Computers in Education. A series
of articles by David concerning the use of computer systems to track and help
manage manufacturing shop floor operations were published in several trade
and professional magazines. He was lead author of the Product Identification and
Tracking section of the SME Tool and Manufacturing Handbook. For over ten years,
David was a reviewer of business applications-related publications for Computing
Reviews of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). David has been a
member of the ACM since 1963 and was a founding officer of two local chapters of
the ACM.
About the Reviewers
Luc Van Dyck is active as a software consultant and works for a Belgian Microsoft
partner. He started working with Dynamics NAV in 1997 (at that time it was called
Navision Financials 1.10).
In the year 1999, he started the website http://myNavision.net to provide a forum
and downloads for users of the Dynamics NAV ERP system. When Microsoft bought
Navision Software A/S in 2002, the site was renamed to http://mibuso.com;
mibuso.com is one of the largest on-line communities of Microsoft
Dynamics professionals.
This on-line community gives users and developers of products from the Microsoft
Dynamics family (Navision, Axapta, CRM, Great Plains, ...) a place to exchange ideas
and tools, and to find business partners and products. The website provides you
with a forum where you can ask questions about the different Dynamics products. It
also contains a large selection of downloads, in different categories (code examples,
demo versions, webcasts, factsheets, tools, etc.). Microsoft partners can submit their
company details to the Business Directory and publish their add-ons or factsheets in
the Product Directory.
In October 2004, he was awarded with the MVP status (Most Valuable Professional)
by Microsoft, for his active participation in the Dynamics community.
Mark Brummel is an all-round NAV expert. He started 10 years ago in 1997 as an
end user, being an early adopter of the system. Two years later he started working
for a local reseller and used his end-user perspective to develop add-ons for NAV.
In the following years he has developed five major add-ons for three NAV partners
and was involved in over a hundred implementations. Next to the development
projects he has guided and trained both experienced consultants and young talent in
becoming NAV experts.
Because of his experience in all aspects of NAV implementations Mark started to
specialize in escalation engineering. In the year 2006, he started his own company
specialized in this field, helping both end-users and partners with problems.
To share knowledge he writes articles and gives workshops. He also assists Microsoft
at events like Tech Ed and Convergence and participates in product development.
One of his special skills is performance-tuning of NAV systems, combining both
technical and functional knowledge to establish better-running systems and happier
end users.
In the year 2006, Mark Brummel was rewarded with the MVP award by Microsoft.
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: The Basic Ingredients 11
Some Unique NAV Terms Defined 12
The C/SIDE Integrated Development Environment 13
Object Designer Tool Icons 14
Seven Kinds of NAV Objects 15
More Definitions (Related to NAV) 16
NAV Functional Terminology 18
Getting Started with Application Design 18
Tables 19
Example: Table Design 19
Example: Table Creation 20
Forms 22
Card Forms 23
Tabular Forms 24
Main/Sub Forms 24
Matrix Forms 25
Trendscape Forms 26
All Forms 27
Creating a Card Form 27
Creating a List Form 31
Reports 34
Creating a List Format Report 35
Codeunits 38
MenuSuites 39
Dataports 39
XMLports 40
Integration Tools 40
Backups and Documentation 41
Summary 42