Web services

There are situations when you’ll want to call Web services from C/AL, and those Web services might be protected by certificate that your local machine cannot validate directly. Web service might be secured with a self-signed certificate, or by a certificate obtained from an authority that is not globally trusted.

Over the past month or so I was very busy with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Managed Service for Partners . One part was in line of my work, where we were busy around the clock bringing our solution to Managed Service. The other part was creating a handful of videos for Microsoft to promote Managed Service.

Yesterday, as a part of Microsoft’s Road To Repeatability program, I delivered a live meeting session about server extensibility in NAV in which I focused on certain areas of .NET Interoperability and Web Services that in my opinion align well with the R2R message.

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…

With .NET Interoperability around, it’s very likely you’ll be synchronously calling external web services from C/AL, to exchange data. I won’t go into discussing whether or not this kind of architecture is good (my own position is that it isn’t), you may end up having situations where your C/AL code simply makes a synchronous call to external systems, such as web services.

Web services in NAV have an interesting feature: they are stateless. For a system which is pretty stateful otherwise, this feature can be outright annoying. You must get used to it, and then make sure you never ever write code as if there was any state preserved on the other end.

Have you ever needed to connect to the Web services of one NAV instance from another one? If so, I bet that the approach was something like this: you created a .NET class where you defined a Web or Service reference to the target instance, and then you consumed that .NET class using .NET Framework interoperability.

Marketing is nice as long as it matches the reality. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, Microsoft has promised a lot of improvements, but how well does NAV 2013 stand the reality test? Apparently, outstandingly well. Over the past two days, I have intensively tested NAV 2009 and NAV 2013 through a series of five different tests that measure different aspects of NAV data handling.

Passing strongly-typed data to NAV Web services can be trickier than it seems. If you are lucky, you can make your method accept strongly-typed parameters, and you are good to go. However, if you just can’t avoid sending text data, your text must be encoded in EN-US format, otherwise it will cause problems (see this ).

Fasten your seatbelts, you are in for the next round of Web Reference vs. Service Reference, which brings an unexpected twist to the story. After giving reasons why not to use Web References, I’ll now put my devil’s advocate ’s hat on, and try to have you change your mind.