Book Image

Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009

Book Image

Programming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009

Overview of this book

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a well established Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, part of the Microsoft Dynamics family. Dynamics NAV is installed worldwide, with well over one million users. Version 2009 contains many major new features and structures, requiring even experienced Dynamics NAV developers to refresh their NAV development knowledge. Renowned for its challenging learning curve, Dynamics NAV is a complex piece of software with a unique design structure. For developers learning to modify or enhance Dynamics NAV for vital business purposes, the task can sometimes be intimidating. This book is an in-depth step-by-step guide to programming NAV, designed to ease you through the complexities of NAV application development. You will learn the skills and develop the confidence to tackle your own critical NAV applications. This book will act as your experienced NAV programming mentor, helping you to become productive as a NAV developer much more quickly. NAV development is quite complex, with a steep learning curve. This book makes it easy for you. From basic NAV terminology and concept definitions, through the essential building blocks of NAV data structure and objects, you will gain an understanding of the fundamental underlying concepts of NAV. You will learn practical details about NAV object construction and the tools available, including table, page, and report design. You will learn how to use NAV's tools to effectively navigate through the various features of objects, including properties, triggers, and C/AL code, and receive practical guidance on ways to develop and test in the unique NAV C/SIDE development environment. Extensive guidance on software design for NAV is provided along with tips for efficient design of new NAV applications or enhancing existing applications. With its comprehensive collection of NAV information and distillation of years of NAV development experience, this book is not only designed to help you learn, but to act as a reference as well.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Programming Microsoft® Dynamics™ NAV 2009
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Foreword
Preface
Index

MenuSuites


MenuSuites are the objects that are displayed in the Classic Client as User Menus. They differ considerably from the other object types we have discussed earlier. MenuSuites have a completely different structure; they are also maintained differently. In older versions of NAV, menus were constructed as versions of Form objects. With the release of Version 4.0, MenuSuites were offered as a way of providing a User Interface essentially similar to that found in the Outlook Navigation panel. This is the way they appear in the Classic client. MenuSuites are also maintainable in a limited way by the end user without any special license requirements. In addition, MenuSuites have the advantage of only showing the menu items that the user has permissions to access.

MenuSuite entries do not have maintainable properties or contain triggers. Within MenuSuites, NAV developers lost the ability to embed C/AL code within the menus. The only customizations that can be done with MenuSuites is to add, delete, or edit menu entries.

In the Role Tailored Client the data in the MenuSuites object is presented in the Department Menus. As you might expect, the presentation of the information is different in the RTC. In a later chapter, we will discuss more about how to work with MenuSuites and how to work around some of the constraints. The Role Center provides us with a number of new capabilities in that regard.