Simple data types are building blocks for everything you will program. C/AL contains the same data types that you will find in most other programming languages: Booleans, integers, decimals, dates, and strings. There are of course more than just these five, but majority of your programming will revolve around using these types of variables.
As a developer, your job is to build business logic that will manipulate the data that is input by users. This ensures that the data stored in tables is meaningful. Most of this data will be of one of the following data types. NAV is, after all, a financial system at heart. At its most basic level, it cares about three things: "How much money?" (decimal), "What was it for?" (string), and "When did it happen?" (date).
The recipes you will find in this section may not be the most interesting, but are valuable. The functionality described here is used throughout the system. As such, each example in this chapter is accompanied by actual code from base NAV objects in order to better illustrate how they can be used.