Interop

Once upon a time, a smart bloke named Saikichi Toyoda came up with a 5 Whys troubleshooting technique. It postulates that you only need to ask “why” five times to get to the root cause of any problem in a cause-and-effect sequence.

Did you ever need to identify the current object type and ID, programmatically, from within the object? For example, detecting the current table ID in a table trigger like this guy ? Or current codeunit ID from inside the codeunit? Why would you need something like this?

When importing files using XMLports, and especially when handling text files, file encoding is important. If the XMLport expects ASCII, and you feed it UTF-8, you may get scrambled data. If you have mismatching unicode input files, it may just fail altogether.

Indexed properties are commonly used in C# because they allow a lot of syntactical flexibility, and make the code more readable, and easier to follow. Indexed properties are very similar to C/AL array indexing, except for two important differences: In C/AL, indexer is always 1-based. In C#, indexers are 0-based.

The control add-in framework in NAV 2013 is great, because apart from allowing you to put a custom Windows Forms control on the page, it also allows you to interact with it through properties, methods, and events. In my classes I typically create a custom text box control that exposes a property to set the background color on the text box.

When I was writing my last post I had a distinct feeling that I was trampling over some boundaries of good NAV design. After all, you should not do stuff like that, NAV isn’t meant to do things like that, or at least that was how I felt. And then two things happened. First, I asked myself: what the heck, why not?

Handling Excel files in NAV 2013 (including R2) is not as easy as it seems at first. The Excel Buffer table – an obvious choice of the old days – supports only Open XML format (*.xlsx), and Excel Interoperability implementation seems a bit buggy (check the comments in my old post about .NET interoperability: https://vjeko.com/blog/the-beauty-and-the-beast-nav-and-net ).

Another NAV TechDays is over, and again, needless to say, it was a splendid conference. Thanks to everybody who attended one of my sessions about .NET Interoperability: the pre-conference workshop for beginners, the session for beginners, and the advanced, or as I like to call it, the “Black Belt” session.

Oh my. Has it really been *THAT* long? Obviously, yes. Some folks have asked me if I stopped blogging. No, I did not. I just took a way long break from it (which will likely resume the instant I hit the Post button), as I was busy working on other things such as How do I videos for NAV (you can…

If you ask me what the top addition to the NAV technology stack over the past few years is – it’s .NET interoperability. A lot of folks, maybe you as well, would disagree, and say it’s Web services. They are important. But if you are a NAV developer, Web services don’t make your life any easier.