For as many years as I have worked with Navision (since 1990), then one of the customizations I have made the most times for my NAV customers, is to enhance the comment functionality in connection with sales and purchase orders/invoices.
The changes range from simple "pop-up"s displaying an extra important message (originating in the customer comments) when creating a new order, using the standard Comment Line table. To new very advanced setup of order “in-line” comments, with ability to setup comments directly in the sales order lines for order header and footer, as well as additional order descriptions where some comments could print on the pick list and others only on the invoice report.
But despite all these many different customizations, then I have never really done the “Ultimate NAV Comment” enhancement. Nor have I seen any other developers do such an “add-on”.
Have you seen such an add-on, or have you done it you self? Or do you know how this “Ultimate NAV Comment” enhancement should be developed, in a fashion where it could fulfill almost all customers commenting requirements?
I’ve never seen such an add-on and, as you, always developed small or bigger customization in this area.
I just discover recently (and got a bit surprised) then, when archiving sales/purchase documents, the notes get lost: this will be an integration that will do soon in my installations.
Yes, but these small customizations are what’s costing us so much time. And right now I have two clients, with more or less the same requirements in that directly. Same same, but different, like the Thai’s always say. So I was just think that maybe someone were doing it in a better way.
You mean that if you archive a sales order, then the notes are deleted of the original sales order? Doesn’t the same happen when you post it?
Yes Remco, love OneNote too. And for notes it’s just as good (or bad) as the “native” NAV notes of the role-tailored client. They are extremely difficult to display directly within pages (if not using the OneNote client) or print to report.
No, what I’m looking for is the commenting solution that could handle the logic that some of the comments in the system should “flow” in the system. Like many clients need a place to type that special (but for the customer standard) delivery messages like “Put package in the garage. The garage key is under the left flower pot”. Such a message in most cases needs to be copied to the sales order (so that it eventually can be changed as per this order only). Or a “warning”, when the system must give the order entry person a message regarding the customer, that they will see whenever they create a new order for this customer.
The most often used “solution” I’ve used or seen used is either to create the comments as textfields in the customer, and just copy them to the sales order. Or relate the code of the comment table to a new table to “handle” the different types of comments, where they all can “act” differently and have different rules.
And sometimes they need to be printed on the actual document as well. Then the question comes, if the “comments” should stay in the comment tables in NAV, or if they should be inserted as lines on the sales order, allowing the user to see the order in a more WYSIWYG fashion.
And what if they add additional manual comments to the order. How do they easily (without setting attached to line no.) “attach” the comments to specify lines (so that they are able to be exported to their external warehouse)?
I’ve only mentioned customer-sales order comments, but they are just as normal for vendors/purchase, or even special comments on the items. The customizations typically are not difficult, but in a time when everything must be coded to make upgrades as easy as possible, then avoiding this, which is something almost every customer does in one way or another, would be wonderful!
Hi Erik, off course you are quite right. I was to hasty with my answer. Yes it would be good to have something that will be copied during posting. Something like: if haslinks then copylinks. But then not for recordlinks, but for readable text and maybe pictures. Maybe when we have the “events” from NAV2016?