Developer’s Overview of Dynamics NAV

As a developer we look into the platform and try to dig out the fact, how flexible it is to support the customization in order to fulfill the client requirement. Picking up Dynamics NAV as an ERP business solution we make ourselves lucky because Dynamics NAV consists of several thousand potentially customizable program objects along with the Integrated Development Environment (the C/SIDE development tools), which gives us potential to modify those objects and create new ones.


The Dynamics NAV is an object-based system consist of the seven different object types. NAV does not support all of the features of an object-oriented system as full-featured object-oriented system allows us to define and create new object types, whereas NAV only allows us to create and modify instances of the seven pre-defined object types.

Dynamics NAV objects types:
  • Table: Tables are the most important objects types among other objects of NAV, table serves both the purpose to define the data structure (schema) and to capture the data records.
  • Page: Pages enable us to define the way the data will be formatted and displayed appropriately for each of the client types. It enable the user to view, add, change or delete a record from a table.
  • Report: Reports allow to display the data to the user in preview mode before printing or saving the file in any format, means it present the data to user which shows how the data will be printed on hardcopy. Report objects can also be designed to automate a processes.
  • Codeunit: Codeunits are utilized as a containers for code, codeunits consist of no. of functions which are structured to complete specific tasks, and any of these functions can be called by other objects types.
  • Query: Queries simplify the task of extracting the data from one or more tables, making calculations, and presenting in the form of a new data structure. Queries can output data directly to charts, Excel, XML, and OData.
  • XMLport: XMLports allow to import and export the data to/from external files from/to table object. The external data structure can be in XML or other file formats like text or csv.
  • MenuSuite: MenuSuites are different from other object types, because these cannot contain any code or logic. MenuSuites describes the menu entries which are translated into the Departments in the Navigation Pane for presentation to the users in the client environment. 
Below screen shot shows the Dynamics NAV 2018 development environment:




I believe we have covered a brief overview of the Dynamics NAV theory part, if you are here to learn to work upon Dynamics NAV as a developer then must be excited to jump right into development environment and see how NAV is designed to work and respond to the user action in the client environment. We will start to work with Dynamics NAV development environment from next article.

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