The company's old system will probably have a very different data structure. A conversion process must be done in the meantime. In this chapter we'll explain a few tips to convert data to meet Dynamics NAV's needs.
In most of the Dynamics NAV tables, the primary key uses a code field type. For example, all master and document tables do. You can write either numbers or characters in a code field. If a code contains only numbers, people expect the data to be ordered by number. But Dynamics NAV does not act this way. A code is always sorted by character, even if it only contains numbers. This may confuse the user, so using fixed-length number codes is recommended. Let's see this with an example:
Number Sort |
Dynamics NAV Sort |
Fixed length sort |
---|---|---|
1 |
1 |
01 |
2 |
10 |
02 |
3 |
2 |
03 |
10 |
3 |
10 |
As you can see, if you use fixed length codes, the way these codes are sorted in Dynamics NAV is the same as the number sort. Therefore, we recommend...