Preface
In 1997, the company I worked for was looking for a replacement for their MS-DOS-based software package. We were very fortunate in finding Navision Financials 1.1 as a software package that supported the upcoming Windows platform, and was flexible enough to be implemented supporting our demands.
Even though the standard functionality was nowhere near what we have today, the structure of the application's design was simple and solid and has not changed since then.
In the years after that more companies embraced Navision as their answer to the changing demands in the market, and many vertical solutions that exist today started their life cycle. With the acquisition of Navision by Microsoft the interest of new partners grew in to the channel we know today.
The add-on solutions catalogue now has 620 pages with 548 solutions from 208 partners in 36 countries, making Microsoft Dynamics NAV a very popular development platform to create business software.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV offers a unique development experience that can only be fully used once you understand how the standard application parts are designed.
When properly licensed, everyone can change how the application works. With this great possibility comes great responsibility as this means that we can also easily break important business logic.
This results in a unique need for a designer of applications that run inside Microsoft Dynamics NAV to know more about the application without going into deep functional details.
The balance in this book will be between learning and understanding how the standard application features of Microsoft Dynamics NAV are designed, and learning how to use this knowledge when designing our own solutions. The area between understanding the application's functionality and its technical design is very thin.
In this book, we will make changes to the standard application and also create new solutions.
We will also discuss how Microsoft Dynamics NAV can interface with other applications.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics NAV, will introduce you to Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We will talk briefly about the history of the application and talk about the concepts. We will cover some of the basics such as Number Series and Navigation. Then we will discuss the Data Model principles used by Microsoft Dynamics NAV using Master Data, Journals, and Ledger Entries covered by Documents.
Chapter 2, A Sample Application, will implement the theory we learned in the first chapter to make a sample application. The goal of this chapter is to better understand how Journals and Ledger entries work throughout the system and how to create your own Journal application. You will learn how to reverse engineer the standard application to learn from it and apply this to our own customizations. We will integrate the application with Relationship Management and Sales in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and extend Navigation and Dimensions for our solution.
Chapter 3, Financial Management, will explore how the Financial Management part of the application can be used and how it is designed. You will learn important concepts such as VAT, Posting Groups, Closing Dates, Entry Application, and Financial Data Analysis. We will make some changes in the core application by adding new information to the General Ledger, and learn how to integrate Financial Management into our add-on solution.
Chapter 4, Relationship Management, will help us to analyze the sales data in our system and be more productive towards our customers. We will explore the unique design of this part of the application and integrate this with the sample application we created in Chapter 2.
Chapter 5, Production, will show us how to set up Microsoft Dynamics NAV for Production companies. We will discuss the BOM Journal, Manufacturing, and Kitting. Item Costing and Item Tracking are key elements when using this part of the application. We will look at the Planning Worksheet and how to create Production orders using Make-to-Order and Make-to-Stock policies. We will reverse engineer the Inventory Profile Offsetting codeunit and see how this leads to a planning and Purchase Orders. At the end of this chapter we will look at ten ways to customize Production for vertical industries.
Chapter 6, Trade, will discuss the relationship between Sales, Inventory Management, and Purchasing, and how Warehousing can be involved using different levels of complexity. We will learn how Reservation Entries are used in the system from a technical perspective.
Chapter 7, Storage and Logistics, will design and build a solution for planning routes for shipments, a feature that is not available in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We will design a solution that can be used by trading companies not only for their own shipments but also for storage companies. The solution is seamlessly integrated with the Dynamics NAV product. We will extend the journal knowledge we learned in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 with new document structures we learned in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.
Chapter 8, Consulting, will discuss how to implement the Job functionality using four example jobs, and extend jobs with an issue registration and timesheet application using resource groups and calculations.
Chapter 9, Interfacing, will discuss how to design a rock solid business to business interface. We will show what technologies are available to use for interfacing and how these technologies are implemented in the standard product. We will discuss all the built-in interfaces with other Microsoft applications such as Office, SharePoint, BizTalk, and Exchange.
Chapter 10, Application Design, will focus on the concepts of application design and how they apply to Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We will focus on Design to Use, Maintain, Support, Upgrade, Perform, and Analyze. This includes concepts for User Interface, Version Management, and the Development Methodology.
To successfully follow the examples in this book you will need the following:
- The Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 product CD to install the application.
- Ideally you should have a full developers license. This can be obtained by being registering as a Microsoft Dynamics NAV partner. Alternatively, most of the example code can be explored using a demo license which can be downloaded from MSDN.
- Microsoft Office and SQL Server Management Studio for the interface examples in Chapter 9.
The appendix describes how to install these prerequisites.
Basically, this book is for:
- NAV consultants and developers
- Designers of business applications
- Application Managers and End Users
- Business Owners and influencers
This book assumes that you have a basic understanding of business management systems and application development, with a working knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics NAV or another ERP system.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We need to reverse engineer this code in order to see what we need to create for our CreateSquashPlayer function."
A block of code is set as follows:
IF Type = Type::Company THEN
ContComp := Rec
ELSE
ContComp.GET("Company No.");
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
No. - OnValidate()
IF "No." <> xRec."No." THEN BEGIN
SquashSetup.GET;
NoSeriesMgt.TestManual(SquashSetup."Squash Player Nos.");
"No. Series" := '';
END;
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Now we are in the Action Designer and we can search for the Create as part."
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Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this. |
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Tips and tricks appear like this. |
Where to find the Screens in this book
Most of the screens in the book were created using the Role Tailored Client introduced with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009. Wherever possible or necessary the Role Center that was used is mentioned. Some chapters had new or modified Role Centers.
To find a screen, type the name into the search window in the upper right corner of the Role Center (as shown in the following screenshot). This will tell you where in the application's menus the screen can be found:
All the screenshots in this book were taken from the Role Tailored Client which was introduced with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009.
For most of the images the Action Pane and FactBox Pane were turned off to save space. This can be done using the Customize option on each page.
How to read the application schemas
Most of the chapters in this book have application schemas to clarify the flow of data through the system. They are specially designed for this book.
To read the schemas follow the arrows. Wherever possible the functional areas are grouped using boxes. Some schemas might have more starting and ending points as this is how the application is designed. Multiple master data tables are processed using normalized business logic.
This book was written by a Dutch author, which means that all the number and date formatting is done in Dutch formats, for example, 1.000,00 instead of 1,000.00 and 18-10-10 for October 18th 2010.
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