ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV Developer Digest – vol 84

The ArcherPoint technical staff—made up of developers, project managers, and consultants – is constantly communicating internally, with the goal of sharing helpful information with one another.

As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them companywide on Yammer for everyone’s benefit. We in Marketing watch these interactions and never cease to be amazed by the creativity, dedication, and brainpower we’re so fortunate to have in this group—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share them with the rest of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Community? So, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from the ArcherPoint staff. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.

Tom Hunt on problems with a NAV 2015 installation:

I had an issue today doing a NAV 2015 install. Apparently if you're installing NAV and you specify a database name that's not the default demo DB name, the NAV installer gets unhappy and dies in the middle.

Douglas Wiley: Could it have been a license issue? Maybe the CRONUS license doesn't like any other database.

Saurav Dhyani: It may be because of permission, give it a try by running the NAV installer as administrator.

Tom Hunt: We wound up having to move the NAV install files to a directory with a short path (C:\NAV) and then we had to manually delete the old NAV service tier from Windows services. Those two things together let us finish the install.

Kyle Hardin on multiple NAV versions on the same machine:

It is possible to have a couple of different NAV versions installed on the same machine.

I did not run the installers for all of those versions. In general, I run the installer for the lowest build number, get that working, and then copy the NST and client directories for higher builds. The client is easy to get working - I just have another folder on my desktop filled with shortcuts to each RTC and DEV executable for each particular build. I also add an id=<buildno> at the end of each executable path for the DEV client to keep the ZUP files from walking over each other. But the real dark magic is the service tiers.

The NAV Administation Tool gets wonky with several versions – in particular 2015 and 2016 fight, and 2015 loses. And it will be the lowest build number, since that is the installer that I ran. So I abandoned that tool and use the PowerShell Admin tool instead.

Windows key – type NAV 2015 (or whatever) Admin Shell and run that. Run as Administrator. new-navserverinstance. It prompts for a few required fields and then adds the service.

Now comes the dark magic. Run RegEdit, find that service that was just added, and go set the correct ImagePath for that build number. The directory will need to be in there twice - once for the service executable itself, and a second time for the location of the config file.

Once you get that updated, fix your config file as appropriate to point to the correct database, use the ports you want, and offer the instance name.

Reboot.

One other caveat: This may break some of the add-ins, and there may be some other things that aren't perfect. Microsoft says don't do this, but for getting development and normal testing done, this has worked well for me. I am also running this bare metal on my laptop – no VM at all.

Faithie Robertson on document pages in NAV 2016:

Lest anyone else pull their hair out…. I’ve found a new “feature” in NAV 2016. On document pages, such as the Purchase Order and Sales Order, the lines are actually brought into the document through a second page object called the subpage. As we all know, we have been able to pull down on the bottom border of the subpage, below the last line shown on the page, and extend the area to show more lines. Well…this new “feature” makes that a bit more complicated. In NAV 2016 the subpage has fields that relate to document header values in groups below the repeater for the lines.

Within the subpage, you have the lines group, and then you have the new header fields group. If you want to see more rows of data, you cannot pull down on the lines group and extend the rows section. You have to first pull down on the line below the header fields. Once the area for the subpage is extended, then you can extend the rows section by pulling down on bottom border of the rows area. Now, just in case you like lots of white space on your document, you can also now pull up on the lines, and have lots of white space below the header totals to consume your screen real estate. (I’m just going to withhold my thoughts on this.)

If you are interested in NAV development, check out our collection of NAV Development Blogs.

For step-by-step instructions on how to perform specific tasks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, see our collection of How-To blogs.

If you found this post useful, you might also be interested to read through our archive of the Dynamics NAV Developer Digest.