Olof Simren - Dynamics NAV Blog

Most of us that’s been programming in Dynamics NAV for a while are aware of the Excel Buffer table. It is a super useful table that can be used to create and read Excel files from C/AL code. This table have been around as far as I remember, and now it has some siblings, the XML Buffer and CSV Buffer tables. The concept is the same, a table with functions to create or read files, this time XML/CSV files instead of Excel files. Just like with the Excel Buffer table, the XML buffer and CSV buffer table should be used as temporary tables. This blog post describes how those tables can be used.…

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 was released last week. I have installed it and poked around in the new functionality a bit and there are some awesome improvements and new features. Through this blog post I share some of my thoughts on some of the new functionality. The look and feel when first launching the windows client is more or less the same as with version 2016, and I was happy that it could co-exists with all my older installations of NAV (always interesting when installing a new version). Below are some of the new functionality that I have looked into, starting with the parts that I think…

Production orders in Dynamics NAV allows you to consume both less and more than what’s defined on the components and to output both less and more than what’s defined on the operations in the routing. There is no check when you post, which is nice (sometime I which it was like that on sales and purchase orders as well, but that’s a topic for another post). But when you post more than you wanted you need to be able to reverse it. Luckily reversing production output and consumption is easy if you know how to do it (if the production order has not been finished that is). This blog post describes how…

This blog post is about the return merchandise (or material) authorization process in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, this is another topic that is more or less always discussed during Dynamics NAV implementations. The typical scenario is that a customer calls and wants to return a product that they have purchased to get a refund, replacement product or to get it repaired. For this they need an authorization, an RMA. So, how is this done in Dynamics NAV? The short answer is by using a sales return order, which is similar to a sales order but it goes the ‘other way’ and is received instead of shipped…

Do you know that you can create sales quotes without having a customer created in Microsoft Dynamics NAV? It’s been like that as long as I can remember but surprisingly many users and also consultants don’t know this and I have seen lots to workarounds with generic ‘quote customers’, etc. This is a quick blog post describing how you can create sales quotes in Dynamics NAV without having a customer record. This is especially useful for companies that are doing a lot of quotes to prospects that might not turn into customers. With this method you then don’t ‘muddy’ the customer list with companies…

My last post about adding a field to the item tracking lines turned out to be very technical, so this time I am doing a post that is completely without any programming or changes to the application. The topic is parallel routings in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, it is nothing new but something that I get a fair amount of questions about and someone once suggested that I should write a blog post about it. So, here it is! Parallel routings (sometimes also referred to as parallel sequences) are used when multiple manufacturing operations/processes can or is need to be performed simultaneously by routing…

This blog post is to describe how fields can be added to the Item Tracking Lines in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Adding additional fields to this page is a common requirement; it could for example be to add a vendor lot number, some quality measurements, a manufacturing date or any other type of property that should be stored against an inventory lot or serial number. When you first look at it seems like a simple modification but it is actually a bit (or a lot) more involved than just adding the field to the table and the page. The Item Tracking Page is in Dynamics NAV built using a temporary table…

One of the cool new features in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 is the options to use Events. Through events you can create functions that are published and subscribe to them in other objects. The great part here is that Microsoft have incorporated a long list of published functions as part of the standard application which […]

If you have a relative large number of items to plan it could take a while to run the MRP calculations in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an hour to do a full calculation is not uncommon, especially if you have been using the system for a while. In order to not have the MRP calculations to […]

This blog post describes how you activate the ‘Directed Put-away and Pick’ functionality (also known as WMS or advanced warehousing) for an existing location in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. It could for example be that you have been using Dynamics NAV for a couple of years and your business has grown or changed and you want […]