ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV Developer Digest – vol 55

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 the new SHOWMANDATORY field in Dynamics NAV 2015:

It takes so little to excite this NAV developer!

Check out the new 2015 page field property SHOWMANDATORY. Now....think back to all those ugly forms where clients had us color the field background fiery red or eye swelling yellow or violent green! Ahhhh....this is much better :) It works much like a style expression. You assign a Boolean field name, and it turns the mandatory setting on or off based on that value. (See standard NAV page 56 for an example – figure below. Boolean variable VendorInvoiceNoMandatory is set in function SetExtDocNoMandatoryCondition, which is called in OnInit.)

Figure 1 – SHOWMANDATORY field in Dynamics NAV 2015

Problem changing RDLC print orientation for Zebra printers:

Problem: The Zebra printer is ignoring the Portrait/Landscape modes. All I could find online was to set the printer setting for "Print Directly to Printer". But after we tried that this morning we still have labels coming out printed from left to right of the label instead of from bottom to top (as you would be looking at it come out of the printer).

Resolution: As it turns out, two changes to the Zebra Printer setup took care of the issue. On the printer properties, set the "Always Use Driver Settings" to checked, and on the Printer Preferences OPTIONS tab, set the orientation to landscape. We were also able to reduce the darkness of the barcode using the DARKNESS setting as well.

Problem with Dynamics NAV report printing strange characters on NAV 5.0:

Problem: We are in middle of a go-live and looking for ideas with why the inventory valuation worked last month but not this month. When the report prints, we get strange characters printing out. Filters are: Location, Inventory Posting Group, Costing Method. From what I can tell, the report has not been modified. Client is using original 5.0 classic.

Proposed Resolution: I have come across an issue that if you copy and paste something from Excel into a NAV field it can copy over some hidden characters as well. You won’t see it in the table, but it will show up in odd places. So, depending upon what weird characters you have and where they are, this might be the issue. Are the weird characters coming from something they may have copied and pasted or is it a calculation? If the latter, then it’s not this issue. If it is coming from a field, the easiest way to see if this is the problem is to retype the data in NAV and then run the report to see if the character is gone. If you do copy from Excel and then paste into NAV, always copy from the box that shows the data located above the spreadsheet, not from the actual cell.

Suzanne Scanlan shared an article from CIO Review about ArcherPoint:

Suzanne Scanlan shared an article from CIO Review based on an interview with  ArcherPoint CEO Greg Kaupp after ArcherPoint was named in the 100 Most Promising Microsoft Solution Providers in 2015.

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