Preface

Let me start out by saying congratulations on your decision to work with Dynamics NAV. When I started working with Dynamics NAV (formerly known as Navision) back in 1999, Dynamics NAV was nothing more than an accounting system out of Denmark. After a couple of releases, acquisition by Microsoft, and a couple more releases, Dynamics NAV has become a full Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software with rich functionality. With every release, we see technical and functional improvements. And they’re not yet done.

At the time of writing, the Dynamics NAV installation base was 94,000 companies (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/erp-nav-overview.aspx). No other ERP software for the small and mid-market comes close to that number. In addition, Dynamics NAV has a wide range of add-on solutions that are available. Most of these add-ons are built directly within the Dynamics NAV environment with the same user interface. So, by using these add-ons, your company would not need to learn any other new software. One of the main selling points of Dynamic NAV from the very beginning is the ability to customize it exactly the way you run your business. Because of its flexibility, you can find a lot of tutorials and explanations on how to develop specific tasks, but not a lot of tutorials on how to create a project from scratch.

To get acquainted with the Dynamics NAV environment, it’s important for the user to create an entire project from start to finish, not just a specific element, but everything from understanding the business problem, designing it, developing it, and integrating it to Dynamics NAV. By doing so, the user can understand the power (and the danger) of customization and speak on the same terms when consultants are making recommendations on customization.

Your company has made a wise decision to use Dynamics NAV as its main business software. But what good is the world’s most powerful software if you don’t know how to use it? Dive in and learn the software from a development standpoint and take the initial steps to unlock the software’s potential.

This book will walk you through creating an application from start to finish. Once you know how to create a working application that the users can use, you will have the knowledge and the resources needed to create other applications and fill in the blanks with additional resources that are published on the Web.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Dynamics NAV 2013 on Your Computer – For (Almost) Free, teaches you where and how to download free copies of Dynamics NAV. We will walk through the installation and configuration of Dynamics NAV on your computer so that you can start playing around with it. We will also explore using Dynamics NAV in the cloud environment to bypass the installation process altogether.

Chapter 2, Getting Familiar with Dynamics NAV 2013, will go through and highlight some areas to begin navigating around the system. We will learn the design concepts for Dynamics NAV and how to personalize the settings for our session.

Chapter 3, Exploring the Data Structure and Basic Layout of Dynamics NAV, explores how the data flows within the most commonly used modules in Dynamics NAV. We will look up, drill down, and drill across the application to find the information we’re looking for.

Chapter 4, Determining a Task List, will look at some of the requirements for our fictitious company and show you how to create a task list for the project.

Chapter 5, Finding Similar Functions for Inspiration, explores the power of Dynamics NAV to customize a solution to fit our needs. There is not much customization that you will do that has not been already done before. In this chapter, we will examine the requirements from the users and find existing functions in Dynamics NAV to model our solution after.

Chapter 6, Creating the Application – Tables, will teach us how to build custom tables for our project to satisfy the task at hand. The tables are the starting point of every custom application that you will build in Dynamics NAV. We will reference the existing Sales Order function as the basis of our custom application.

Chapter 7, Creating the Application – Pages and Reports, allows us to add, modify, and delete the information without having to use the table itself. We discover how to create pages for the users to interface with the data. We will also create reports so that we can get meaningful outputs from the data entered.

Chapter 8, Extending Our Application, helps us add additional functionality to our tables, pages, and MenuSuite to improve user experience.

Chapter 9, Dynamics NAV Modules to Address the Specific Needs of Your Business, explores the additional capabilities of Dynamics NAV as a comprehensive ERP solution for the mid-market. The setup in the demonstration database can be quite overwhelming. This chapter will give us a glimpse of the advanced modules in Dynamics NAV so we can understand the functionality out of the box.

Appendix, Additional Resources and Conclusion, will examine the additional resources related to Dynamics NAV. This book will help you get started so you can quickly get up to speed in Dynamics NAV. If Dynamics NAV is something you’re interested in, and you’re hungry for more in-depth information, you will find some places you can go here.

What you need for this book

For this book, you will need the following:

• Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013:

  • Microsoft Dynamics NAV Windows Client

  • Microsoft Dynamics NAV Development Environment

  • SQL Server Express 2008 or higher

• Visual Studio Web Developer 2010 Express:

  • Visual Studio Web Developer 2010 Express or newer

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated) Redistributable Package

• Miscellaneous tools:

  • Java Client (for the cloud environment)

Who this book is for

This book is for any user whose company has bought or has plans to buy Dynamics NAV as their main business software. This is also for any developer, who may be familiar with another accounting software, but who wants to get into the Dynamics NAV field.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: “The built-in Cmdlet allows the administrator to configure and troubleshoot permissions and connection problems on a local or remote computer.”

A block of code is set as follows:

IF “No.” = ‘’ THEN BEGIN
  TestNoSeries;
  NoSeriesMgt.InitSeries(GetNoSeriesCode,xRec.”No. Series”,”Posting Date”,”No.”,”No. Series”);
END;

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: “After the installation finishes, if you click on your Start icon in Windows, you’ll notice a few new icons.”

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[e-mail]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Customer support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.

Piracy

Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.

Please contact us at <[e-mail]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.

We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.

Questions

You can contact us at <[e-mail]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.