NAV 2016 – Page 2

Database deployment of add-ins in NAV 2016 is broken, big time

Post published:January 25, 2016
Post comments:8 Comments
Reading time:10 mins read

If you are developing .NET assemblies for use with NAV, then sooner or later you’ll figure out that the new database deployment of add-ins in NAV 2016 is broken.

I’ve just suffered through medieval torture of attempting to have my NAV forget about a database-deployed assembly.

First of all – if you are merely consuming an off-the-shelf assemblies developed by somebody out there, you’ll probably not need to worry at all. However, if you are developing your own assemblies, then sooner or later you’ll find yourself stretched in exactly the same torture rack.

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Deploying from Visual Studio, update

Post published:November 21, 2015
Post comments:1 Comment
Reading time:3 mins read

A few days ago I have published my PowerShell script that streamlines and automates deployment of control add-ins from Visual Studio. Over the past couple of days I have improved it a little bit, and fixed a few bugs, so here’s an updated version that is more resilient to your project structure, produces resource zips that NST not only extracts, but actually understands, and does a little more.

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Activity Log or Activity Lock pattern?

Post published:November 20, 2015
Post comments:5 Comments
Reading time:5 mins read

Today at NAV TechDays 2015 in Antwerp, I attended a presentation by Nikola Kukrika, Ciprian Iordache, and Gary Winter, at which Ciprian presented a new design pattern based on a new feature in NAV 2016: Activity Log.

In a nutshell, this new feature, and thus the design pattern, aim at helping trace issues and facilitate troubleshooting by leaving information in the database about what was done, by whom, if it failed, and if it did, why.

All pretty and nice, but – as Ciprian pointed out – there is a bad aspect about it: when an error happens, and everything is rolled back – the activity entry is rolled back together with everything else. Nikola later explained how this could be solved through writing into temporary tables, but this either requires redesign by Microsoft or special coding techniques by you.

However, there is a bigger caveat than this. Non-persisting data in case of errors is a problem, but the bigger problem lies elsewhere. Let me explain that bigger problem here, and then give a silver-bullet solution to solve it all.

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Fixing Preview Posting: Part 2

Post published:October 16, 2015
Post comments:16 Comments
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

Post published:October 15, 2015
Post comments:12 Comments
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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