This Blog Article was brought forward from my old blog

As I described in my previous post, we will get report design guidlines.

One of these guidlines is to use itterated background changes in list reports. This looks realy cool, just like listplaces in the RTC. But how do you implement this. Wel, it is extremely easy.

BackgroundColor

This is a property that every contol has in RDLC and you can populate it with a name or hexnumber representing the color

Expressions

In most RDLC properties you can write expressions. This is a very easy language which is unfortunately different from C/AL. For example the IF/ELSE statement is IIF(Condition, Yesresult, Noresult). But still easy to learn.

Built In Report variables

One thing I advice everyone to learn is that RDLC has built in variables that you can use, similar to CurrReport.PAGENO in the classic designer, but TONS and TONS more.

One of them is RowNumber.

If you combine this you can create an expression like this:

=iif(RowNumber(

Nothing) mod 2, “LightGrey”, “White”)

Result

The result is making reports easily look like this:

This Blog Article was brought forward from my old blog

One of the “Real life” tips I showed at NavTechDays is how to use the classic debugger smartly.

What I see people do many times is turn on the debugger with Breakpoints on Triggers

This means that the debug process wil break on each trigger it finds, meaning form & table triggers, functions and objects.

Even if you step through this process with F5, debugging a posting process like Sales wil take forever as there are hundreds of triggers that you will pass.

So what is the alternative.

The alternative is to place your own Breakpoints; this can be done in two ways

1. Via the Object Desiger

If your license allows you to edit C/AL code you can use this icon to go to the code of each object.

If you do this you’ll enter the C/AL Editor that shows the code behind the application. But if you look closer there is a hidden “column” in this editor.

If you use the “Show Column” feature you’ll see that this column even has a name: Breakpoint Column

If you select a line of code and hit F9 you’ll see that a “Red Dot” appears in the column, meaning there is a breakpoint for the debugger.

Whenever you start the debugger now without the “Break on triggers” option, you’ll see that the debugger will stop at this point, allowing you to go directly to the “suspected” piece of code.

But wait, there is more.

2. Via the debugger

You cannot just put breakpoints in the C/AL code via the object designer, you can also set them in the debugger directly, while debugging.

This allows you to set a new breakpoint somewhere down the line. This avoids the issue of stepping into all the functions and losing time.

Be Careful: This only works in the active object! You cannot step back into the previous object and add a breakpoint there.

They communicate!

The great feature about these breakpoints is that the debugger and code editor remember each others breakpoints. So if you place a breakpoint in the debugger, the red dot wil appear in the C/AL editor. This is done using the system table Breakpoint that is not visible in the Object Designer but is from the Report/Form/Page designer.

So remember using this smartly and save a lot of time in your debugging processes.

What does the open “red dot” mean?

Was one of the questions on NavTechDays, and I have to admin that I did not knew. But fortunately Lars Hammer of Microsoft was in the room and he knew. (And he should).

This allows you to temporarily disable a breakpoint without throwing it completely away. So you can quickly reenable it.

Stop Debugging

Another great feature about the debugger is the possibilty to roll-back a transaction that you are debugging. This is often useful when you have a scenario that requires a long time to setup and you don’t want to backup and restore databases just to have the same scenario while finetuning your code.

Remember this when you need to fiddle with your code and you want to see the step-by-step results.

Call Stack

In Dynamics NAV you are likely to step into a loop of objects if you debug a complex process. Sometimes you hit an error somewhere in a tree and you want to see where this code was executed from. This is where you can use the Call Stack.

In this example, Codeunit 80 was called from codeunit 81 and before that from Form 42. You can double click on an object and see which line of code caused the execution of that object. This you can then use to stop the debug process, go to the object and place your breakpoint there. Remember: you cannot add breakpoints in the debugger in a tree of objects.

Dirty Reads

Sometimes you would like to see the data that your process creates without actually committing the transaction so you can roll-back and change your code. With the SQL Server option you can do that since NAV is using the ReadUncommitted isolation level. This allows users to see data in the database that is not committed yet.

NOTE: with the introduction of buffered inserts you might not see the inserted data since that is buffered to either a find command on that table or the commit of the transaction. If you do want to see the uncoommitted data and you know where to go, then put in a simple FIND statement on a copy variable of the record object.

That’s al for today folks.

This Blog Article was brought forward from my old blog

Update 2014 : This is obsolete from version 2013 and onwards

In the classic client we are used to getting a runtime error when a flowfield cannot be calculated if the key metadata is missing:

This no longer is the case in the RTC, it will just show zeroes:

I’m not sure if this is a bug or a design decision.

When an end user asks you to change a report, they often show a paper print of the report with the changes drawn with a pen or marker.

They often (or always) don’t know the report number and if you’re unlucky the report is printed in some automatic process and you’ll have to dig into the code to find the report ID.

This can be easily solved by printing the report number in the header or footer like this:

When doing this on Internal Reports there should be no problem.

Take care,

/Marq

PS: With thanks to Reinder van der Veen.

This Blog Article was brought forward from my old blog

UPDATE 2014 : In current versions with DotNet interop you would probably want to use that instead.

As many of you know there is a lenght limitation of text variables in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

One of the real-life problems you can encounter due to this is when doing interfacing, especially when reading EDI files.

EDI files are often very long and without Cariage Return Line Feeds.

Solutions are using a dataport with a delimiter such as ‘+’ instead of NewLine or asking the EDI vendor to implement CRLF’s.

If both are not possible, for example if you want to read the EDI files though a NAS you have to use a codeunit with File variable.

Using the File variable with long textlines with result in overflow errors.

The solution to work around this is using a stream variable. This is how:

i := 1;

EDIFile.TEXTMODE(FALSE); EDIFile.OPEN(NewFileName); EDIFile.CREATEINSTREAM(EDIInStream); WHILE NOT EDIInStream.EOS DO BEGIN   EDIProcBufferTemp.”Entry No.” := i;   i := i + 1;   EDIInStream.READTEXT(EDIProcBufferTemp.”EDI Text”, 250);   EDIProcBufferTemp.INSERT; END;

EDIProcBufferTemp.FINDFIRST; EDIText :=  EDIProcBufferTemp.”EDI Text”;

WHILE NOT Finished DO BEGIN   IF STRPOS(EDIText, ‘+’) = 0 THEN BEGIN     EDIProcBufferTemp.DELETE;     IF EDIProcBufferTemp.FINDFIRST THEN       EDIText := EDIText + EDIProcBufferTemp.”EDI Text”     ELSE       Finished := TRUE;   END;     IF STRPOS(EDIText, ‘+’) <> 0 THEN BEGIN     EDITag := COPYSTR(EDIText, 1, STRPOS(EDIText, ‘+’) – 1);     EDIText := COPYSTR(EDIText, STRPOS(EDIText, ‘+’) + 1, 1000);     SplitInfo(EDITag);   END ELSE     SplitInfo(EDIText);  //* Last Tag END;

In this example I move the contents of the textfile to a InSteam variable. The Insteam variable supports the ReadText method that allows us to read the content in smaller chunks.

Then I move the lines into a buffer table for easier processing. (I love working with buffer tables, they make cleaner coding).

Since breaking the file into 250 characters might actualy split some of the EDI tags, I re-connect the lines into a larger text varible. I can easily merge two 250 character lines into one 1000 character variable.

Remember to also process the last tag when there are no more delimiters.

Here you are, good luck.

If you want to learn more about interfacing you can read chapter 9 of my book which is dedicated to this subject.

This week I got a question from one of my book readers about how to convert a SETSELECTIONFILTER to a SETFILTER command.

This is something that is implemented in the standard product on a few list pages. The Customer List page (22) is one of them.

The code is handled in codeunit 46, SelectionFilterManagement

This is the code:

 RecRef.OPEN(TempRecRef.NUMBER);
 TempRecRefCount := TempRecRef.COUNT;
 IF TempRecRefCount > 0 THEN BEGIN
   TempRecRef.FIND('-');
   WHILE TempRecRefCount > 0 DO BEGIN
     TempRecRefCount := TempRecRefCount - 1;
     RecRef.SETPOSITION(TempRecRef.GETPOSITION);
     RecRef.FIND;
     FieldRef := RecRef.FIELD(SelectionFieldID);
     FirstRecRef := FORMAT(FieldRef.VALUE);
     LastRecRef := FirstRecRef;
     More := TempRecRefCount > 0;
     WHILE More DO
       IF RecRef.NEXT = 0 THEN
         More := FALSE
       ELSE BEGIN
         SavePos := TempRecRef.GETPOSITION;
         TempRecRef.SETPOSITION(RecRef.GETPOSITION);
         IF NOT TempRecRef.FIND THEN BEGIN
           More := FALSE;
           TempRecRef.SETPOSITION(SavePos);
         END ELSE BEGIN
           FieldRef := RecRef.FIELD(SelectionFieldID);
           LastRecRef := FORMAT(FieldRef.VALUE);
           TempRecRefCount := TempRecRefCount - 1;
           IF TempRecRefCount = 0 THEN
             More := FALSE;
         END;
       END;
       IF SelectionFilter <> '' THEN
         SelectionFilter := SelectionFilter + '|';
       IF FirstRecRef = LastRecRef THEN
         SelectionFilter := SelectionFilter + AddQuotes(FirstRecRef)
       ELSE
         SelectionFilter := SelectionFilter + AddQuotes(FirstRecRef) + '..' + AddQuotes(LastRecRef);
       IF TempRecRefCount > 0 THEN
         TempRecRef.NEXT;
     END;
   EXIT(SelectionFilter);
 END;

In older versions than 2013, this code is on the page/form object.

Enjoy!