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.
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.