Dynamics NAV 2016: Posting Preview – It’s About Time
With the release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 we have a number of new features in the Financial Management area, but the one that I am most excited about is Posting Preview. This has been a frequently requested modification and now it is finally a standard feature.
All you need to do to use it is navigate to the Actions menu on a Sales or Purchase Order and click Preview Posting. You’ll see a dialog open that looks like it is posting the order, but in reality it is just storing some information to show you. Once it has completed this process, you’ll see a familiar looking window that looks an awful lot like Navigate.
You can easily drill down into the entries to see the details. Notably, you’ll find that the Document No. has been set to “***”, meaning that it did not actually get assigned a number from the posting number series and did not actually hit any of your ledgers.
Figure 1. Posting Preview
Figure 2. G/L Entries Preview
For the developers out there, you may be wondering how this works. Well, if you’ve been working with NAV for a while it won’t come as a big shock.
There’s a new Codeunit 19 named Gen. Jnl.-Post Preview. Any time we have a new posting action, we get a new Codeunit (Post, Post and Print, Yes/No, etc.). All of the add-on developers out there should take note, as there are standards that should be followed in regards to numbering and naming your Codeunits related to posting.
If you take a look at it, you will see some code that is similar to that found in Page 344 – Navigate. In short, it writes all of the data that would normally be posted to a temporary table.
And if you go into Codeunit 80 – Sales-Post, you’ll see a global variable called PreviewMode that is used throughout. This makes sense because, while we still want to execute the posting code, we don’t want to commit any of those changes to the database or perform certain actions like archiving the document.
Figure 3. Example use of the PreviewMode global variable in code
So, for everyone getting ready to upgrade, be sure you do some in-depth testing of this feature. You never know when one of your customizations will get migrated over and not play nice with the new Posting Preview functionality. Make sure nothing actually ships or invoices when you preview and that no ledger entries get created.
If you have any questions about this new function or about NAV 2016, contact the experts at ArcherPoint. And follow ArcherPoint’s Dynamics NAV Development blogs.