www.it-ebooks.info Programming Microsoft ® Dynamics™ NAV 2009 Develop and maintain high performance NAV applications to meet changing business needs with improved agility and enhanced flexibility David Studebaker BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info Programming Microsoft ® Dynamics™ NAV 2009™ NAV 2009 NAV 2009 Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: November 2009 Production Reference: 1271009 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 978-1-847196-52-1 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by Faiz Fattohi (faizfattohi@gmail.com) This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info Credits Author David Studebaker Reviewers Mark J. Brummel Steven Renders Acquisition Editor Douglas Paterson Development Editor Ved Prakash Jha Technical Editors Aanchal Kumar Charumathi Sankaran Copy Editor Sanchari Mukherjee Indexer Rekha Nair Editorial Team Leader Gagandeep Singh Project Team Leader Lata Basantani Project Coordinator Joel Goveya Proofreaders Claire Cresswell-Lane Erica Mukherjee Graphics Nilesh Mohite Production Coordinator Aparna Bhagat Cover Work Aparna Bhagat This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info About the Author David Studebaker is Chief Technical Ofcer and the owner of Liberty Grove Software, Inc., with his partner Karen Studebaker. Liberty Grove Software, a Microsoft Partner, provides development, consulting, training, and upgrade services for Microsoft Dynamics NAV resellers and rms using Dynamics NAV internally. David has been recognized by Microsoft as a Certied Professional for NAV in all areas—Development, Applications, and Installation & Conguration. He has been honored as a Lead Certied Microsoft Trainer for NAV. He has been programming since 1962 and developing in C/AL since 1996. David has been an active participant in each step of computing technology—from the early mainframes to today's technology, from binary assembly language coding to today's C/AL and C#. David's special achievements include the development of the very rst production SPOOLing system in 1967. Application areas in which David has worked include manufacturing, distribution, retail, engineering, general accounting, association management, professional services billing, distribution/inventory management, freight carriage, data collection, and production management among others. David has had a wide range of development, consulting, sales, and management roles throughout his career. He has been partner or owner and manager of several software development businesses, while always maintaining a signicant role as a business applications developer. David has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He has been writing for publication since his undergraduate college days. David has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery since 1963 and was a founding ofcer of two local chapters of the ACM. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info Acknowledgement I would like to especially thank my partner in life and at work, Karen Studebaker, for her unagging support and encouragement in all ways since those early days at Purdue. No one could have a more wonderful partner or spouse. I would like to acknowledge the guidance and love that I received from my parents as well as the enthusiastic support and love of my wonderful children and other family members. Finally, though there are far too many individuals to list, whatever I have been able to accomplish would not have been possible without the help of many, many friends, mentors, and associates along the way. Life would be very poor without all the kind and generous folks I have met. I also wish to thank the great people at Microsoft and Packt who assisted me with their contributions and advice throughout the creation of this book. May you enjoy this book and nd it useful. A special thanks to these helpful people at Microsoft: Microsoft Technical Reviewers: Overall Coordination—Michael Nielsen, Director of Engineering, Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Chapter 1: A Short Tour through NAV 2009 - Esben Nyhuus Kristoffersen Chapter 2: Tables - Thomas Hejlsberg Chapter 3: Data Types and Fields for Data Storage and Processing - Thomas Hejlsberg Chapter 4: Pages—Tools for Data Display - Esben Nyhuus Kristoffersen Chapter 5: Reports - Yuri Belenky Chapter 6: Introduction to C/SIDE and C/AL - Lars Hammer Chapter 7: Intermediate C/AL - Lars Hammer Chapter 8: Advanced NAV Development Tools - Lars Hammer, Hans Kierulff Chapter 9: Extend, Integrate, and Design—into the Future - Christian Abeln, Bardur Knudsen Dynamics NAV Help documentation: Paul Chapman, Dynamics NAV 2009 Documentation Manager, and his team, including Jill Frank, Søren Groes-Petersen, John Swymer, and Bob Papsdorf Dynamics NAV UX Guide: Hans Roed Mark, UX Manager, Microsoft Dynamics User Experience Team This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info About the Reviewers Mark J. Brummel is an all-round Microsoft Dynamics NAV specialist. He started in 1997 as an end user but quickly moved to the other side of the table. During ten years, he has worked for resellers where designing and maintaining add-on systems was his specialization. Some of these add-on systems exceed the standard product where it comes to size and complexity. In addition, coaching colleagues and troubleshooting 'impossible' problems is his passion and part of day to day work. Mark has trained most of the experienced NAV developers for the NAV 2009 product in The Netherlands and Belgium. Today he is working freelance, is hired by almost every NAV reseller in the Benelux area, and is also frequently asked to help out in escalated implementations by end users. Mark is an associate in the Liberty Grove Software network and a business partner of SQL Perform Benelux. Mark was the rst to use the NAV 2009 (CTP3) product in a production system feeding back valuable information to Microsoft. A special project and passion is performance tuning of the Dynamics NAV product on SQL Server. Since 2007, he is involved in the development of the 'SQL Perform Tools'. A specialist's toolset which allows both trend and escalation analysis of key elements for systems speed. As a unique specialist, he has done break-through research in improving the performance of Dynamics NAV on SQL Server. In his free time, Mark maintains his blog on www.brummelds.com. This blog contains a wide range of articles about both the Microsoft Dynamics NAV and SQL Server product. He is also a frequent speaker at Microsoft events. In 2006, Mark was rewarded by Microsoft with the Most Valuable Professional award for his contribution to the online and ofine communities. In 2007, he also reviewed Programming Microsoft ® Dynamics ™ NAV. Steven Renders is a Microsoft Certied Trainer in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. He has more than 12 years of business and technical experience. He joined Plataan in 2006, where he provides training and consultancy focused on Microsoft Dynamics NAV development, Microsoft SQL Server, Business Intelligence solutions, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, and Database Performance Tuning. He is also an expert on Dynamics NAV 2009, on which he has already delivered many training sessions. Steven has also developed content for Microsoft Learning. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info Foreword Since the rst version of Dynamics NAV, simplicity has always been the biggest asset of the product, and the goal has always been that it should be easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to develop. For the NAV developers, this has been accomplished by limiting the number of concepts they have to learn. The rst is to use the concepts which are well known from real life, for example, Form, Page, Table, and Report. The next is to introduce a programming language C/AL, which is targeted at writing business logic and not device drivers. The third is to add an integrated development environment, which removes the need for "plumbing" logic, which typically pollutes the code in a normal development environment. The fourth is to add automatic transaction and error handling, which saves the developers a lot of time since they don't have to write "clean up" code. The fth and probably most important, is to reuse code constructs across the application, so that once you have learned one subsystem, it is easy to understand and master the rest. The latter is the secret sauce of NAV and what makes it possible to master doing customization across the whole NAV application. This is, in very few words, what David's book is all about and what Dynamics NAV is all about. Michael Nielsen, Director of Engineering, Microsoft Dynamics NAV This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter 1: A Short Tour through NAV 2009 13 NAV 2009: An ERP system 14 Financial Management 16 Manufacturing 16 Supply Chain Management (SCM) 17 Business intelligence and reporting 18 Relationship Management (RM) 18 Human Resource management 19 Project management 19 Significant changes in NAV 2009 19 Two-tier versus three-tier 20 Role Tailored Client 21 SSRS-compatible report viewer 21 Web services 21 NAV 2009: A set of building blocks and development tools 21 NAV object types 22 The C/SIDE Integrated Development Environment 22 Object Designer tool icons 24 NAV object and system elements 25 NAV functional terminology 28 User interfaces 29 An introduction to development 31 Our scenario for development exercises 31 Getting started with application design 32 Application tables 32 Designing a simple table 32 Creating a simple table 33 Field numbering 34 This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info [...]... book is the NAV 2009 system, including the new three tier Role Tailored Client In this chapter, we will take a short tour through NAV 2009 Our path will be along the following trail: • NAV 2009 from a functional point of view as an ERP system • What's new in NAV 2009 • Definitions of terms as used in NAV • The C/SIDE development environment and tools • A development introduction to the various NAV object... earlier Navision generation) has been a successful product line for over two decades During the 2008 -2009 fiscal year, Microsoft Dynamics NAV crossed the milestone of more than 1,250,000 installed users, a major achievement for any application software At the end of calendar 2008, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 was released—a major new version of the product While this new version contains the same business... 7th November 2009 2406 W 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 A Short Tour through NAV 2009 The toughest thing about being a success is that you've got to keep on being a success—Irving Berlin Microsoft Dynamics NAV (including the earlier Navision generation)... the RTC is for users, and as a developer, you will generally use the Classic Client for your work NAV 2009: An ERP system If you look at NAV 2009 from the point of view of a firm using NAV to help run its business, you will see it as an integrated set of business applications software Microsoft Dynamics NAV is generally characterized as an ERP System ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning An ERP... several product lines Since that time, one of the major challenges for Microsoft has been to meld these previously competitive businesses into a coherent whole One aspect of that effort was to rename all the products as Dynamics software, with Navision being renamed to Dynamics NAV Fortunately for those who have been working with Navision, Microsoft has not only continued to invest in the product, but has... new version of the system, a year or two later, were not greeted with universal enthusiasm from the NAV technical community But the Dynamics NAV development persevered and Microsoft continued supporting the investment, until NAV 2009 was released in late 2008 With the addition of Service Pack 1 in mid -2009, the biggest hurdles to the new technologies have been cleared More new capabilities and features... mergers In 2000, Navision Software A/S and its primary Danish competitor, Damgaard A/S, merged Product development and new releases continued for the primary products of both original firms (Navision and Axapta) In 2002, the now much larger Navision Software, with all its products (Navision, Axapta, and the smaller, older C5 and XAL) was purchased by Microsoft, becoming part of the Microsoft Business... Short Tour through NAV 2009, covers basic definitions as they pertain to NAV and C/SIDE In addition, an introduction to eight types of NAV objects, Page and Report Creation Wizards, and tools that we use to integrate NAV with external entities is provided There is a brief discussion of how backups and documentation are handled in C/SIDE Chapter 2, Tables, focuses on the top level of NAV data structure:... for the foreseeable future Continuous enhancement As early as 2003, research began with the Dynamics NAV development team planning moves to further enhance NAV, taking advantage of various parts of the Microsoft product line Goals were defined to increase integration with products such as Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook Goals were also set to leverage the functional capabilities of Visual Studio... by andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 Preface In 1990, Navision was expanding its marketing and dealer recruitment efforts into Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom Moreover, in 1990, V3 of Navigator was released Navigator V3 was still a character-based system, albeit a very sophisticated one If you had an opportunity to study Navigator V3.x, you would instantly . andrew mayo on 7th November 2009 2406 W. 16th Street, , Wilmington, , 19806 www.it-ebooks.info Programming Microsoft ® Dynamics NAV 2009 NAV 2009 NAV 2009 Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing All. helpful people at Microsoft: Microsoft Technical Reviewers: Overall Coordination—Michael Nielsen, Director of Engineering, Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Chapter 1: A Short Tour through NAV 2009 - Esben. communities. In 2007, he also reviewed Programming Microsoft ® Dynamics ™ NAV. Steven Renders is a Microsoft Certied Trainer in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. He has more than 12 years of business and