ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV Developer Digest - vol 95
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.
The Association of Dynamics Professionals:
It is a pleasure to let you know that ArcherPoint has become a Corporate Sponsor of the Association of Dynamics Professionals (DynamicsPro). We are committed to the success of the Microsoft Dynamics community and one key to this success is objective competency standards for professionals in our industry. The DynamicsPro certification exams for both Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV help accomplish this. This independent, not-for-profit membership organization exists to serve the Microsoft Dynamics community by establishing competency standards and assessments, and to positively impact the Dynamics community through member-led advocacy initiatives. I have been impressed with the progress that has been made and ArcherPoint supports the certification standards that they have put forth.
Question on filtering out an ampersand (‘&’):
I could use your help. I am currently working with a client that has an ampersand ‘&’ in their Vendor No. field which makes it a struggle to filter on this information.
I understand (been told) that there is a SQL Property on a Field that can be set to prevent using special characters in that field.
Has anyone used this feature? What are the ramifications in NAV for using this feature? What will a user experience if they try to use a ‘&’ in a field that has a SQL Prevention?
Kyle Hardin: It’s fairly easy code to intercept that during validation of the No. field – I’ve done mods before where we added some sanity checking to places like No., especially on Items, and sometimes even on the Description field to keep them from adding * or # or %. However, this is using technology to solve a people problem. Perhaps a simple order of “Don’t do that” from the Powers That Be can keep that from happening.
Bill Warnke: You have the option of changing it from Varchar to Variant (which changes the alphanumeric number sorting but would still allow an ampersand) and an integer. The big problem changing to integer is that the entire table would need to be empty because you’d have to throw out any non-integer data and then you’re just doing numbers as a No. At that point you might as well just set a number series and not allow for manual entry. I’d also be wary of how this would impact NAV. Any report or function dependent on the sort order would be impacted. If the filtering issues are trying to find a single customer putting the single quote around it will help, ie ‘CUST&0001’
Suzanne Scanlan shared an article on coming up with catchy email subject lines:
Sometimes, it’s difficult to generate a subject line that catches people’s attention. This blog can help you come up with some attention-getting lines of your own:
Subjects, Subjects, Who’s Got the Subjects…
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 NAV 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.