C/AL

Printing NAV reports in different languages

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Last week I delivered the C/SIDE Development course for partner community in Zagreb. As always, questions abound afterwards. Today, I’ve got a question from an attendee: “What’s the best way to print a report in multiple languages?”.

Up front: this is NOT a technical post. It IS about technical solution, but it is primarily about design, usability, standards and best practices. I’ll plain ignore the fact that it does use a few C/SIDE or C/AL references, so please, do likewise 😉

(I said this because I kind of swore not to C/AL around this blog anymore, but again – sometimes I just have to do it.)

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Default database approach

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Last Friday, while enjoying a not-at-all healthy Salisbury steak with cheese, I had an interesting discussion with a partner: should NAV consultancies create default databases?

A default database (in this context) is a packaged solution built upon standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV, where a consultancy has introduced a number of features that they sell to all their customers as the standard solution, instead of standard NAV. The modifications to standard NAV can range from simple report adornments to minor feature improvements  to full-scale horizontal or vertical functionalities.

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Featuritis Cure

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Don’t you just love when users come up with new feature ideas at a microprocessor clock rate. Even before you finish developing one, five new requests pop up. This is a disease, and it’s called featuritis!

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NeverENDing story

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Hint: this is a post for developers, and mostly junior developers, those who are still learning how to code properly. I know, I promised not to blog about stuff like this, but I simply couldn’t help this time.

A friend of mine has asked me for help.

“There is this C/AL function I had to rewrite, now I end up with 106 BEGINs, and only 105 ENDs. Do you have any idea how to find where this missing END belongs?”

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Estimated time left

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I promised to myself not to post technical stuff on this blog. But as Seth Godin said not that long ago, never’s not such a long time. And also, why shouldn’t I share a piece of useful advice if I have it. So here it goes.

Have you ever started a lengthy NAV batch job, and then wondered how much longer it is really going to take? Me too.

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Code of coding 4: Die, hard(coding) 2

  • Reading time:6 mins read

In Croatia, most of roads resemble battlefields. They are so full of holes and patches from all kinds of repairs over time, that they have to re-pave them every five years or so. It is an awful waste of taxpayer’s money, and makes you wish for the world of Jennifer Government to come be. Anyway, as soon as they re-pave the roads, not a week usually passes before they come again, with jackhammers and heavy machinery of all sorts, and start drilling away, blocking the road in process and causing mass-frustration, just because some wacko has suddenly remembered that it would be nice idea to pass the optic cable underneath, or some valve started leaking.

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Code of coding 3: Die, hard(coding)!

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Development is an important phase of implementation of a highly-customizable ERP system, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and that’s why I put a lot of emphasis on development, specifically on coding part of it. I’ve tried to cover a few do’s and don’ts of coding, but so far I’ve left one of my favorite clay pigeons out: hardcoding.

If you want me to define hardcoding, I’d probably put it something like this: hardcoding is the ugliest possible form of laziness, incompetence, ignorance, indifference, carelessness, or any combination of the five, which in short-term makes my toenails curl up, and long-term leads to poor and unmaintainable systems and unhappy customers.

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Code of coding 2: Documenting changes

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Few days ago, when I wrote about coding, I didn’t have a slightest idea that at the same time, at the completely opposite part of the globe, Dave was blogging almost about the same thing. It is interesting to know that I am not the only one out there actually worying about code, and how it looks like.

The most common thing I used to hear when I asked bad coders about their code was: “It works, why shoud I care.”

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Code of coding

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Code is boring. It is geeky. And it’s ugly, too. In C/AL it is especially ugly. While contemporary development tools come with all sort of gizmos which make coding easier, such as color-coding, auto-completion, refactoring, etc., C/AL editor seems like having awaken from a thousand-year sleep. Take a look at the color coding: there is none. Or there is, but palette is limited to that of Charlie Chaplin’s. There is some functionality which looks like auto-completion but it is not, and the text editing capabilities make you dream about Notepad at night. But you can look at it from a different angle. C/AL editor is the way it is for a reason: to keep programmers away. It’s the defence mechanism developed over twenty or so years of evolution of the system, to protect the system from rookie knowitall programmers ripping away that stupid Gen. Jnl.-Post Line codeunit and rewrite it the way it should be. With this, we come to Rule No. 1: Know what you are doing.

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Convergence

  • Reading time:9 mins read

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.

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