New to Navision - Seeking Assistance

Good day. I am new to Navision. I have been offered an interview at a UK based Navision development company. I am a Delphi developer with 3 years development and 2 and a half years of SQL Server. However, I have not ever seen, farless touched Navision. Could someone maybe point me in the direction for getting as much knowledge on this subject as possible. Sample code, what is Navision, sources of information. Thank you.

If you’ve found your way here then I take it you’ve found Navision’s own website at www.navision.com and had a look at that. In not too many words, it’s a business system featuring the usual suspects (finance, sales, purchase, stock, manufacturing etc.). I haven’t used Delphi but from what I do know it is not so far removed. You’ve got forms with controls (buttons, text boxes and so on) which have properties on them and code behind them that is triggered by events like entering text, clicking buttons. If you are familiar with those sort of concepts then you are on the right track. People have said that the code syntax is a bit Pascal-ish but it’s easy to pick up. The real trick is understanding how everything fits together so you know where to go to make things happen and where to find everything. For example, you don’t hold a total for stock on hand against an item. Instead, you use something called a flowfield. You put filters (e.g. for locations and/or date ranges) on the field and then tell it to calculate. This goes away to the item ledger entries (the records of all the stock movements in/out/roundabout) and adds up all the relevant records for you to give you the final answer. The reason it can afford to do this is SIFT (Sum Index Flow Technology) which means that totalling certain defined fields can be done in two reads of the database irrespective of how many records there are. It isn’t a general purpose language so there are some things that make you bang your head in frustration but at the same time there are many features that make your life easier. Swings & roundabouts. Overall, it’s a good product to work with so good luck at your interview and maybe we’ll see you around here a bit more. Cheers, John Edited by - JohnP on 2002 Jan 11 15:18:55

Craig Like Delphi Navision has its roots in turbo pascal and you will find many things very simular. I don’t think your perspective employer will expect you to know how to program Navision. Depending on your experiance of business software and comeing from delphi I would expect you to know the basics within a month and be an expert within six months. There is not that much to it if you are willing to put the effort into learning how the posting routeins work. Paul Baxter