I had a dream: decoupled NAV

You know about PRS (Partner Ready Software), don’t you? It’s the initiative started by Mark Brummel, Eric Wauters (Waldo), and Gary Winter (not necessarily in this order), and then they decided to expand their team by one more member. I am not quite sure if this was a good move, but the time will tell. It always does.

The main goal of the initiative is to enable you to customize NAV in a repeatable way. Repeatability is kind of a buzzword, but PRS doesn’t just buzz the word. PRS believes repeatability is the key. Today maybe you don’t care about repeatability. In two years, or latest five, you’ll want to go back and rethink your angle. PRS wants you to rethink now.

One way of getting repeatable customizations is through patterns. There are patterns, all over NAV, that repeat, time after time, over and again. Agosto dopo agosto dopo agosto dopo agosto as Jovanotti would put it. Pun intended. When a pattern repeats itself, it’s repetition, not repeatability. There is a big difference between them, big as a house. To get repeatable, is to get rid of repetition. Instead of having essentially the same piece of code all over the place with a hint of Goldberg Variations, how about having it only once, in a single place?

Like, having one place where you assign a number from a number series to any master record, document, journal, you name it. Instead of at least—let me guess—120 different places in about as many objects. Then, if you want to customize one small aspect of it, you just touch that one single place. You can then repeat the same customization for hundreds of customers, not only surviving the version upgrade, but making it (the upgrade) an essential, non-disruptive, piece-of-cakeish part of your service offering. That’s the repeatability that PRS is all about.

But—there is always a but—the way NAV is today, we are a long way from this kind of repeatability. A long and painful way away.

That’s why I had a dream. I know it’s only a dream because to make NAV do what I am about to share here would be to downright rearchitect it from the core. But I’ll share it nonetheless. Keep reading.

By |June 19th, 2013|Uncategorized|1 Comment
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Retiring NavigateIntoSuccess.com

A couple of months ago, when I asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter if anybody knows how to move a WordPress blog to another domain, everybody said that I was crazy. You don’t do these things, they said. And yet, when they heard the reason why I was about to leave my old domain, everybody agreed.

NavigateIntoSucess.com has served me well. I moved my public WordPress website to this custom domain very early on. It has become a kind of a brand. But it is a pretty long name. You can easily mistype it. It’s difficult to remember it if you only occasionally stumble upon it. It doesn’t at all relate to me as a living person behind it. So I decided to move it all to a fresh new domain: vjeko.com.

By |May 18th, 2013|Blog|12 Comments
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How Do I… Videos on MSDN

imageMSDN has started running a series of the How do I… videos for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 (feed here). The idea is to showcase a technical feature in 5-15 minutes. The project is still ongoing, but a number of videos have just been released and announced on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog.

The project is a joint effort by Plataan and Microsoft, and I participated as a technical expert in charge of seven videos. I’ve already recorded five of them, out of which three are online.

You can find the links below, and please come back to this page as I’ll update it as more videos are published.

By |March 16th, 2013|Dynamics NAV, NAV 2013|2 Comments
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Transaction Integrity with Connected Systems

Broken pencilWith .NET Interoperability around, it’s very likely you’ll be synchronously calling external web services from C/AL, to exchange data. I won’t go into discussing whether or not this kind of architecture is good (my own position is that it isn’t), you may end up having situations where your C/AL code simply makes a synchronous call to external systems, such as web services.

Any external call is an expected point of failure. An important question you must always have in mind when calling external functions is transaction integrity. When writing code that targets only NAV, the structure of code is largely irrelevant, as long as you are not using COMMITs (which is another thing you should avoid at all costs). However, as soon as you introduce external calls, the structure becomes critically relevant. Critically relevant.

I’ve talked about this during my 2012 NAV TechDays session, and I promised I’d blog about it – so, here it goes.

By |March 5th, 2013|Best practices, Development|3 Comments
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Cross-Call State Sharing in Web Services

imageWeb services in NAV have an interesting feature: they are stateless. For a system which is pretty stateful otherwise, this feature can be outright annoying. You must get used to it, and then make sure you never ever write code as if there was any state preserved on the other end.

The reason for this is simple – there is no actual protocol that you use to communicate with NAV through SOAP. Calls are ad-hoc, essentially atomic, each one can accomplish a great deal of things in a single go, and it makes programming a whole lot simpler. The price you pay is the state. Once you close the connection, the session ends and the transaction commits (or rolls back). Next call starts from scratch.

If you need to preserve any state between the calls, whatever that state might be, you are toast. NAV simply doesn’t support it out of the box. A common misconception is that single-instance codeunits help. They don’t. The single instance is always single per session, and since each call is an isolated session, it means that each single instance codeunit dies at the end of the call.

Pretty annoying, isn’t it?

Well, it is, and it isn’t. I won’t argue about validity of situations where you need to preserve state across multiple web services calls – I am going to show you how to do it when you need it.

And what I’m going to show you works in both NAV 2009 R2 and 2013.

By |February 21st, 2013|Development|8 Comments
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