Book Image

Building ERP Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics NAV

By : Stefano Demiliani
Book Image

Building ERP Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics NAV

By: Stefano Demiliani

Overview of this book

Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV in the real world often requires you to integrate the ERP with external applications or solve complex architectural tasks in order to have a final successful project. This book will show you how to extend a Microsoft Dynamics NAV installation to the enterprise world in a practical way. The book starts with an introduction to Microsoft Dynamics NAV architecture and then moves on to advanced topics related to implementing real-world solutions based on NAV and external applications. You will learn how an enterprise distributed architecture with NAV at the core can be implemented. Through a series of real-world cases on every topic and every industry (sales, retail, manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, and so on), you’ll see step by step how to efficiently solve a technical problem. These common problems encountered in a NAV implementation will be solved using the entire technology stack that Microsoft offers. By the end of the book, you will have the knowledge to efficiently solve certain scenarios, you will know which is the best solution architecture to propose to a customer and how to implement it.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Building ERP Solutions with Microsoft Dynamics NAV
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating the service layer


As described in the architectural diagram of our solution, we don't want to directly expose the NAV web services (business logic) to an external application. We want to create a WCF service that will be something like an integration layer between NAV and the B2B application. This will permit us to have the following things:

  • NAV objects (Query and Codeunit) and their methods not directly published to the B2B website

  • Custom authentication from the B2B application to access the business functions

  • Custom methods exposed to the B2B application, not directly binded to the NAV entities, with the possibilities to use protocols such as XML or JSON

The information's flow will be as represented in the following diagram:

Let's start to write the WCF service now by perfomring the following steps:

  1. Open Visual Studio, select the WCF template, and go to File | New | Project… | WCF Service Application in order to create the project solution.

  2. We want to create a WCF service that is able...