navision - external application via xml

Business Central/NAV Developers Forum
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Hi Guys, i’m a very beginner in this integration area … I want to ask you something about integration between Navision attain 3.6 and external application via xml. If i have external application, for example Point of Sale system built in VB or Delphi, and the application want to send Daily transaction to Navision Database in the headquarter, and then the headquarter in real time term, can look if there are some transactions. Do i have to install user portal here to enable the xml data interchange ? or just only need the NAS ? if it’s possible done with only NAS , how we send the xml to Navision so Navision can understand if it’s a sales order or the other. And how we must format the xml so Navision (via NAS) can recognize the xml as a valid request ? Do you have any example regarding to this case ? What document you recommend me to read ? Many many thanks for your help. Regards

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  1. you don’t need to format XML files in a particular way, just define a syntax and use it to write and read the files (if you want you may define DTD sintax files). 2) NAS is used to let you run Attain C/AL code (and CodeUnits) from external applications, so you can handle the XML files. 3) You can use Named Pipes to send XML files; it is also possible to use MS Message Queuing, bou it has big problems with NAS (it often hangs … and we couldn’t fix the problem). 4) no detailed documentation exists (?!?), just something about NAS installation. Hope to have been useful Andrea
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Sorry, could you explain “define a syntax” a little more? Where I have to do this?

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quote:

Originally posted by konstbel
Sorry, could you explain “define a syntax” a little more? Where I have to do this?

Anywhere, ranging from “inside your head” over a piece of paper or a Word document to a fully-fledged XML-DTD. This is not meant as a joke. XML allows you to define your own tags as needed (to be precise, the “syntax” actually is fixed - it’s the tags that get defined). For example, you might define XML tags for storing information about books: John Smith Advanced XML and so on. The only important thing is that both the creator and the user of the XML document agree on what tags are being used and what their meaning is. If you later need to add a tag, you are free to do so. There is a lot more about XML than can be summarized here in a short posting, so I’d suggest that you check out the relevant organizations and web sites if you are interested, like http://www.w3c.org and http://www.xml.org