All around NAV dev and test
"It giet oan" as the Friesians would say. Monday March 25, 2013 I will conduct a workshop NAV Online Help for CfMD in Veenendaal (NL). Still some places left. If you are interested feel free to contact me by mail at lvanvugt@fluxxus.nl.
With our full, newly formed development team we joined the first day of the TechDays 2013 in The Hague (NL). Consisting mainly of .NET developers there was an ocean of presentation to choose from. Being a NAV techy only this ocean was reduced to the size of at least the North Sea. Should I have mourned? Well actually not. Don't know about you, but I can handle only one presentation at a time. So more or less my program of that day was sort of set from the start.
So what did I join:
Very useful to me! OK, the last one was somewhat out-of-scope for me, but nevertheless a bit useful now working with a gang of web developers. Brian, Fokko and René gave me quite to food for thought, next to some confirmations on what we are doing now with TFS 2012. So thanx guys!
For those interested: find Fokko's and René''s slide decks here:
Well nothing different. Just like before. Nag, nag, nag, nag ...
Typically an issue that keeps popping up every now and then on the NAV forums.
You have managed to learn to create Help for your add-on and compile your Help project to get the .chm and .hh files. Now you're ready to test it from the UI and have copied both files to the relevant directories. At least that's what you think - or should I say hope?
So you start your Windows Client (RTC) and browse to one of your own pages - or maybe a standard page containing some of your add-on fields. You select the field and press F1, triggering the system to build the help index, opening the help window and ..., ouch, not displaying the help topic you are expecting it to do. Nevertheless checking the table of contents (TOC) confirms that your project is there, hence you wonder ...
In most cases the answer lies in the deployment of your help project. Two things are crucial here:
The recipe is simple (copied from the help of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Help Toolkit):
[where addin_a.chm is typically your compiled help project. Note that there is some reasoning behind this naming addin_a which I will not discuss here).]
As your help project indeed is showing up in the TOC, the first part - installing the compiled project - isn't the problem. However the second often is. For this it's important to understand that the .hh file is the intermediate between the application structure and the help system. It contains a mapping between the application objects/fields/controls and there related help topics. The evaluation and execution of this mapping is processed by the application server (service tier), hence you have to make sure that the .hh file is stored on the machine where this service is running (see step 3) and that the service is restarted to get the .hh file included.
Recently I have been contacted by a number of Dutch partners to help them out on the creation of Online Help for their add-on in the context of CfMD-ing the add-on. Having a longtime experience with Online Help and recently with CfMD I surely will pick up this request. But instead of doing this on a one-by-one basis, helping each partner individually, I have suggested them to combine forces and get together in a 1 or 2 days hands-on workshop, reducing their cost and at the mean time taking advantage of the presence of multiple people/partners, where each can learn from the other's specifics. If needed attention can also be giving to other (technical) aspects of the CfMD process.
So here I am to call upon any other Dynamics NAV partner in need of such a workshop to join in. If interested write a comment below or send me a mail at lvanvugt@fluxxus.nl.
... that I can both target Dutch and partners from other countries. For sure I will be organizing a workshop in the Netherlands for Dutch partners, but also can do this for others. In the Netherlands or outside.