Archiving documents within NAV 5.0 via bespoke application

Greetings all,

I am quite new to NAV so forgive me if I’m retreading common ground…

As a developer for my company’s document management product, I am looking at possible programmatic methods to archive PDF documents (autogenerated via our product) to the NAV system. These documents will need to be associated with a chosen company / person.

A coarse-cut idea that came up would be to store the documents as ‘attachments’ within an ‘interaction’ associated with the required contact. As a method of interfacing with our bespoke application the C/FRONT API seemed like a possible option, but this raised several issues:

  • As C/FRONT only updates data tables without executing business logic, is this a sufficient mechanism to achieve the above or does it need to be used in conjunction with something like Navision Application Server? A colleague suggested that using C/FRONT to write to the NAV database was indeed ‘risky’, it should really only be employed to read from the database.

  • If I wanted to create new attachment / interaction records is there reference material that covers the NAV database tables / columns in any detail? I would like to find out with reasonable confidence what set of records needs to be created / updated.

As I value the opinion of people on this forum, I would be most grateful for any guidance or opinions on this.

Can you use C/Front to update the “Record Links” table, with a path to a network location that holds the PDF?

T