NAV 2016

Sorting out the DLL hell, Part 1: The Problem

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  • Reading time:6 mins read

Let me tell you right away if you need to read this post at all. If you never wrote a single .NET class library intended to be used as a .NET interoperability assembly from C/AL, or if you never ever deployed a .dll file into the Add-ins folder of either Service or RoleTailored Client, then you probably don’t want to read this post.

Good, since you are still reading it means that you either deployed your own or somebody else’s .NET stuff into NAV’s client or server’s Add-ins folders. If you ever did so, you probably did not enjoy the experience too much. If you did enjoy the experience, maybe you should not read any further either.

Even better! Since you are still here it means that you didn’t enjoy deploying assemblies. Let me break some good news – all your problems are now gone! And I am not talking NAV 2016, I am talking NAV 2013 and anything newer.

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Fixing Preview Posting: Part 2

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  • Reading time:13 mins read

In my two last posts, I laid out the technical design of the Preview Posting feature, and then showed how to simplify its design to get around the unwanted behavior of TryFunction.

One thing is obvious from these posts: Preview Posting wants to simulate posting of a document (or journal) to show what the results would be, but without leaving any actual trace in the database. In database lingo – we want the transaction to be rolled back.

Rolling back is no brainer. Simply throw an error, or do a silent abort, Except if there is COMMIT. In that case, no rolling back helps.

I have announced earlier that my today’s post will be about how to nest transactions in C/AL so that an inner COMMIT has no effect on the transaction as a whole, which can still be successfully rolled back.

That’s what this post is about.

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Fixing Preview Posting: Part 1

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  • Reading time:6 mins read

In my yesterday’s article about the Preview Posting feature in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 I said there are at least two ways to redesign it to avoid both the unnecessary complication and inherent dangers of the TryFunction feature behavior.

In my first post, I’ll show that it would have been perfectly possible to achieve exactly the same functionality without try functions. And it would take a total of one new line of code, one changed line of code, and six removed lines of code.

Let’s go and simplify it.

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TryFunction Lessons Learned from Preview Posting

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  • Reading time:11 mins read

One of great new functional features of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 is preview posting. It allows you to preview all the entries that would result from posting a document or a general journal.

Preview posting is not a simple thing. If it was, Microsoft would have delivered it years ago. There must be something in particular with NAV 2016 that powers preview posting, so I decided to investigate it and see exactly how it works.

I am not particularly happy with what I found out, but I have also learned some valuable lessons from it. In this post, I’ll share my findings.

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What’s New in NAV 2016: Record Type Improvements

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  • Reading time:4 mins read

We all use records. And we all used to whine about records not supporting all the features we need. And they still don’t, but in Microsoft Dynamics NAV they support much more.

Some of the new features are well documented, some are somewhat documented. So here’s what I figured out so far is new about the Record data type.

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