Allowing customers access to our Nav database

Business Central/NAV Developers Forum
1

Please forgive my newbie-ness at Navision, and please feel free to move this post to the correct forum if I have posted it to the wrong one.

I would like to create a web page (using HTML, PHP, and js) that allows customers to perform limited searches in our Nav database, which search will result in read-only displays and/or docs. For example, our Nav currently stores docs (PDFs, etc.) that our customers want from time to time. We want our customers to get on the website, select their own company’s docs, and display/download them if they wish.

We don’t want to give customers direct access to Nav (by logging into Nav, for example), but we do want to give them access to specific docs/info, controlled by us. I’m not new to PHP, but how do I use PHP to connect to Nav?

Our Nav is 2009 and resides on a MS SQL server under Windows Server 2008 R2. Our PHP and web services reside on a LAMP server (Ubuntu).

I have scoured these forums at Dynamic Nav for quite awhile, and have found others who are looking to do similar to what I need, but most of the posts are ancient, and some of their questions aren’t answered.

Thanks,

Noji Ratzlaff

Quartzdyne (Salt Lake City)

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Hi,
This might be an old question, but it will be hard to find a perfect answer for your.
There are several way to achieve this, depending on the flavor of each user.
The answer by the book, is enabling web services in NAV 2009, and obtain data from NAV from those web services. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/freddyk/archive/2010/01/19/connecting-to-nav-web-services-from-php.aspx

You could also query directly SQL Server from PHP, but this can lead to issues if done incorrectly (performance, if any update is made to NAV it can broken your PHP, etc)

You could also export daily the data from NAV and import into another database, offloading the work to another server.

There are many ways, depending query volumes, type of information displaying to external, etc.

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I will try these and get back to you. Thank you for taking the time to answer!

NojiRatz