He who has not first laid his foundations may be able with great ability to lay them afterwards, but they will be laid with trouble to the architect and danger to the building—Niccolo Machiavelli

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge—Grace Murray Hopper

In Chapter 1, we will deal with the basic foundations of Microsoft Dynamics NAV (pronounced as N-A-V, spelling it out), the objects that make up an NAV application, and their essential capabilities and limitations. While NAV has many structural and syntactical similarities to other programming languages, particularly Object Pascal; NAV has many unique features and facilities as well.

Once you are through with Chapter 1, you will feel more comfortable with the NAV development environment, will get acquainted with the tools, and will look forward to getting more detail. Also, you will develop knowledge that will allow you to begin thinking about application development within the NAV environment, using the NAV programming language.

While learning the NAV development environment, we will develop a simple application as a functional enhancement to the base product. Our application will be designed for the management of a fictitious association for those who work with C/SIDE and C/AL. We'll call it the worldwide Charter/Association of NAV Developers Ltd, or C/ANDL for short. The goal of C/ANDL is to shed a little light into NAV Development. We will deal with member records, skills and education information, hold meetings, and offer some training publications for sale. Our application will be designed as a new application function, but with the plan of using base functionality for various accounting functions.

Chapter 1: The Basic Ingredients Some Unique NAV Terms Defined The C/SIDE Integrated Development Environment Object Designer Tool Icons Seven Kinds of NAV Objects More Definitions (Related to NAV) NAV Functional Terminology Getting Started with Application Design Tables Example: Table Design Example: Table Creation Forms Card Forms Tabular Forms Main/Sub Forms Matrix Forms Trendscape Forms All Forms Creating a Card Form Creating a List Form Reports Creating a List Format Report Codeunits MenuSuites Dataports XMLports Integration Tools Backups and Documentation Summary

Paperback 480 pages Released: October 2007 ISBN: 1904811749 ISBN 13: 978-1-904811-74-9

View the book details on PacktPub.com