ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest - vol 11
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.
Faithie Robertson on a bug in NAV 2013 R2 regarding captions in fields:
NAV 2013 R2 bug: Here’s one for the books! How about Dynamics NAV rendering a page with the wrong caption on the fields? (Yeah. It did that – – twice!) Yesterday I was notified that a date field had a Boolean checkbox on the page, and it was fully functional – check it – uncheck it. But when I did, it updated a different field. The Boolean field had been given a date field with a fully functional drop down to a calendar date lookup. So we deleted the object metadata, deleted the fields, recompiled, added back the fields and complied – and it was fixed. Today, same thing but with two date fields, where “Issue Date” is being updated is captioned as “Supply Date”. The Item List page and SQL show the issue. I’m creating a MS case for this, but until we have a resolution – BEWARE.
Figure 1 – Field Caption Mismatch on Item Card
Figure 2 – Page Showing Caption Mismatch
….and so far, trying to fix it a second time DOES NOT WORK. The fields won’t carry their own captions – without rhyme or reason.
Jon Long asked:
Faithie, I’ve seen this before and it was related to custom fields on pages that had gone through the transformation process. If you look at the underlying table, make sure all fields have an entry in the Caption column for custom fields.
Faithie Robertson replied:
So after Jon and I talked and looked at it together, it wasn’t transformation. This page was created by merging code in TEXT from the NAV 2013 version. Jon and I worked on this together for a while trying several things to no avail. So I’ve moved forward with a MS support case.
I finally got to show the MS Support agent yesterday this in a GoToMeeting session. He was just as baffled as I was 🙂 He cannot reproduce it with a copy of our FOBs in his database. He tried with the same client version and also could not replicate it, so we’re sending a copy of the full database. If anyone else runs into things like this, please tap me so I can let them know we have the same issue on another client.
We seemed to have narrowed it down yesterday in the support session to when we allow the fields to take on their default caption from the table. If I enter the captions themselves in the Page design – they’re fine. Also, if I cut/paste the fields out of the page designer spot where they are located in order to move them to another location, they don’t show at all. It does not seem to be a problem with the ZUP file (see below).
Jon Long on ZUP files:
ZUP Lives!
Just when I think I know where all meta data is stored in the new NAV versions, I get another surprise.
Working with NAV 2013 today, the “Do you want to replace the ZUP file?” popup pops up. So, I go look in the AppData, and, sure enough, there it is: fin.zup.
According to Microsoft’s description of the setup parameters, it stores the same information the ZUP has always stored.
What is confusing is that there is also the PersonalizationStore.xml located in a sub folder in AppData as well. I thought this had replaced all of the ZUP functionality. However, Microsoft seems to be using both for the same thing. I would think that one will go away eventually. Here’s the Microsoft post on the PersonalizationStore.xml.
Kyle Hardin added:
I think the ZUP file is only used by the dev client. I went into the Dynamics NAV 2013R2 RTC and it did not update the modified date on the ZUP file when I exited. PersonalizationStore.xml did get updated.
Faithie Robertson shared a post about Dynamics NAV 2015 and Power BI:
Here’s an article I found regarding NAV 2015 and Power BI. This is intriguing to say the least!
Dynamics NAV 2015 – Harnessing the Power of Business Intelligence (BI)
Alan Campbell on Project Risk:
Risk Neutrality: This is a post by the author of “just give me a number”. Read it, I think you will like it, especially sales people. I like the following paragraph, which forms the basis for our Agile approach:
“Even when one is in the happy situation of choosing between alternatives with positive values, businesses often yield sub-optimal results by applying their risk tolerances at the project level. The natural human desire to stamp out all risk leads many companies to enact arbitrary thresholds for projects to meet (e.g., no more than a 15% probability of losing money). They will spend millions of dollars to acquire information (imperfect information, I might add), which may reduce the probability of loss from, say, 18% to 13%, thereby crossing the magic, completely arbitrary threshold. This is a waste of their shareholders’ money.”
Risk Tolerance and Risk Neutrality (You Can Live with More Risk Than You Think)