by Vjekoslav Babic on March 16, 2013
MSDN has started running a series of the How do I… videos for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 (feed here). The idea is to showcase a technical feature in 5-15 minutes. The project is still ongoing, but a number of videos have just been released and announced on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog.
The project is a joint effort by Plataan and Microsoft, and I participated as a technical expert in charge of seven videos. I’ve already recorded five of them, out of which three are online.
You can find the links below, and please come back to this page as I’ll update it as more videos are published.
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by Vjekoslav Babic on February 21, 2013
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.
The reason for this is simple – there is no actual protocol that you use to communicate with NAV through SOAP. Calls are ad-hoc, essentially atomic, each one can accomplish a great deal of things in a single go, and it makes programming a whole lot simpler. The price you pay is the state. Once you close the connection, the session ends and the transaction commits (or rolls back). Next call starts from scratch.
If you need to preserve any state between the calls, whatever that state might be, you are toast. NAV simply doesn’t support it out of the box. A common misconception is that single-instance codeunits help. They don’t. The single instance is always single per session, and since each call is an isolated session, it means that each single instance codeunit dies at the end of the call.
Pretty annoying, isn’t it?
Well, it is, and it isn’t. I won’t argue about validity of situations where you need to preserve state across multiple web services calls – I am going to show you how to do it when you need it.
And what I’m going to show you works in both NAV 2009 R2 and 2013.
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by Vjekoslav Babic on September 30, 2012
![MP900406779[1]](http://navigateintosuccess.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/MP9004067791_thumb.jpg "MP900406779[1]")
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. It was kind of clumsy, inflexible, but it worked.
How cool would it be if you could do something like this:
WITH WebService DO BEGIN
CONNECT(‘http://localhost:7047/DynamicsNAV70/WS/CRONUS%20International%20Ltd/Page/Customer’);
INIT;
SETVALUE(‘Name’,'Test Customer’);
SETVALUE(‘Blocked’,Cust.Blocked::Ship);
SETVALUE(‘Credit_Limit_LCY’,10000);
CREATE;
MESSAGE(‘I just created Customer No. %1 in another NAV instance.’,GETVALUE(‘No’));
END;
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by Vjekoslav Babic on June 25, 2012
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. My conclusion is clear: NAV 2013 is faster than any NAV you have ever seen, including the Classic client on the native database.
Continue reading to find out more about my findings and testing approach.
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by Vjekoslav Babic on June 21, 2012
Performance is one of those things you can’t get enough of and NAV is one of those systems where an extra operation per second is always welcome. Yesterday, during the Expert Panel at the NAV day of the Decisions Spring conference, there was a question: is there any improvement in how NAV 2013 works on SQL Server.
And the answer is: oh yeah!
As a matter of fact, everything is new and improved.
Jörg has already posted an overview of the news of NAV on SQL Server in his last blog post, but I still think there’s room for a couple of more words on the really amazing palette of news and improvements.
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MSDN has started running a series of the How do I… videos for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 (feed here). The idea is to showcase a technical feature in 5-15 minutes. The project is still ongoing, but a number of videos have just been released and announced on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog.
![MP900406779[1]](http://navigateintosuccess.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/MP9004067791.jpg "MP900406779[1]")
