Today I got a comment from another soul out there, spending their time blogging about Microsoft Dynamics NAV. I’ve immediately put the link to my blogroll, and it really deserves it, because it is the best blog on the topic I’ve seen so far.
Few days back, on that blog, there was a post about setting filters, which didn’t work as expected, and you had to write a wordy workaround for a thing that should work as expected, but surprisingly it doesn’t.
There is only one way to abort a user action in Microsoft Dynamics NAV: by using the ERROR function. This function essentially stops the execution of all code, and prevents completion of the user action, whatever such action might be.
One of typical situations where ERROR is used to prevent user action is during validation of a new value in a field. A typical concrete example of this behavior is entering the Customer No. value in the Sell-to Customer No. field on the sales order form. When users enters a value, the system goes through a series of checks, called validation, which in the end may result in the system rejecting this value. Obviously, the only way for the system to reject a value entered by the user is, yes you’ve got it, by calling the ERROR function, which returns the system to the last committed state before the error.
When Navision Attain attained it’s new name, Microsoft Business Solutions-Navision (the one before the current one), many other things changed as well. Good ol’ main menu was gone. Forever.
Whoa, this has been a looooong pause. If you come across some presentation, rhetoric or speach theory, most of them agree on an idea that it’s not the words that make a speach a of art, but the pauses. If the same applies to blogging, I must be quite an artist.
Last time I was here, sometime during the previous geologic era, I said that not much is going to change with this blog. How young and stupid must I have been to say such a thing, because since then everything changed. For starters, I stopped blogging. Not a big deal, if you take into account the number of people hanging around over here. But here’s the real catch and the true change to this blog. The number of people reading it increased at an infinite rate: from zero, to one. It took me almost two months to notice it, allright, but nevertheless, I hope I am not going to turn this single reader down.
That’s it, this was just a short note, before I get to writing the next post. A real one. Just about now.
Technically it was yesterday, September 1st, but in practice it will be tomorrow, September 3rd, because it is a Monday. Tomorrow I start at my new position at a new company. The position is Consultant, and company is Microsoft. Quite a change for me.
This change was pending for a while, and tomorrow it comes to completion. I was never this excited about a new job, and this is my fifth new job in my career. And I never felt this much responsibility. And this much challenge.
I love unsolvable problems. I simply do. I had one a few days ago in the office, and I solved it.
So, the problem went like this. A discussion has been raised among developers about whether it would be possible to display a blank form over a populated table, where user would be able to immediately enter the data of a new record, without having to press F3 (or inserting a new record manually). The problem is, this doesn’t work that way in Dynamics NAV.
I started this blog too seriously. Instead of starting relaxed, I jumped right into the battle head first, with difficult topics such as convergence and history of Dynamics. When I was thinking about starting this blog, one of the ideas was to discuss mainly technology and functionality. Last time I wrote about technology and functionality I wrote a disertation. This time, I’ll be quick.
Hello there! I could as well start with “Hello there, myself!”, but that’s a charm of blogging – you do it regardless of whether there is anyone else reading this stuff. I’ve read somewhere that most blogs have exactly one regular reader – the blogger himself. So far, this is the situation with my blog, and I don’t really mind if it stays that way for the time being.
Ok, I’ll get to the point. There is a change in my career path on the horizon. Nothing really radical, because I am staying in the same business, I am continuing to work with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV, but my work might be a little bit different. To be totally honest, this was on the horizon for quite a while, but there have been some, err, circumstances, and I wasn’t really sure whether it will be go, or no go. Now it is 99% go, but yet I don’t feel comfortable to blurt it out all at once. Suspense is the key…
Tons of documents exist about Microsoft Dynamics NAV, but most of them start with marketing lingo, and don’t wander away too much from it altogether. While it is nice to know that it is a system which will give you freedom to focus on your business, it is also nice to know what is it made of, and how it works inside. Inspired by a total lack of resources which would give a clear picture of all the system components and their relationships, I wrote this post in hope someone might find it helpful.
It has been a while since I was here, and I will not try to make any excuses. I could say that I have been busy (which would be true), and that I have a family that I love spending my time with (which would also be true), but true reason is the one you all know: I have been lazy.
Last time I promised to say a word or two about convergence once. Let me do it this once.