Wednesday 2 March 2016

NAVY <---- NAVX (Enhancement of Extensions in Dynamics NAV 2016)

There're already lot of blogs that explains about NAVX (Using extensions and events in dynamics NAV without affecting the source code).

This NAVX package will create a new layer on top of NAV I mean it will show the customizations we have done for addons only in SQL server but not in Client of NAV. This is something interesting I found while I was trying to upgrade one of the addons from 2015 to 2016 using a new concept called Extensions in NAV 2016.

But, the upgradation using Extensions didn't make me surprise because I found few things which will not upgrade using this tool.

1. Standard codeunits cannot be modified
2. Reports cannot be upgraded using extensions
3. No customizations can be done on extensions

(If we need to customize again we need to uninstall the NAVX modify the object set in NAV and then install NAVX again, This is something not userfriendly and is not much appreciated.
But, for every problem there's a solution.

Microsoft has came with a new package called NAVY(An enhancement of NAVX).

This NAVY is a package manager for NAV 2015 and NAV 2016. But as of now it has been tested only in NAV 2016.

The features that is included in NAVY are:

You can install, uninstall, suspend, restore or you can even build a NAVY package.


This is something new you can see in NAVY than you saw in NAVX.

Yes, its suspend and restore.

As I said earlier, In NAVX if you need to customize any objects you must uninstall the NAVX package go back to NAV and modify which is risky and time consuming.

But, In NAVY you can suspend a package for sometime which will save the field values in a special tables by removing the  changes from standard objects.

Same way the restore command will installs the changes to standard objects and will restore the field values.

There is already a prerelease software which has been released for our learning purpose but it is still not left anywhere for acual use.

You can install a package to a database,

NAVY install Name=<packagename> DatabaseName=<databasename>
You can download the NAVY prerelease software in my dropbox. Click here to download NAVY