This week I started on my first Navision Attain project. I’m in the process of bringing one of our add-ons from Navision Financials 2.60.E to the new version. Before this I’ve spend a little time playing, but mostly just looking at Navision Attain and the new features. And what are my initial comments to this? Basically I’m happy with the new technologies and features that we find here. Especially the multi-dimension part, although this is also what causes most work to me during this upgrade. But it’s great not to have to do this modification again and again. They’ve also handled the field captioning a great way, although I don’t really understand the “CaptionClass” property completely. So why am I so annoyed? Take a look at the Attain/Financials - Known Issues forum. See how many of the issues that are still not resolved. For me the following issues are “big issues” that have been known for years: - The debugger still sucks! - The RunObject property. The lookup makes you have scroll through ALL OBJECTS to find one. You cannot i.e. search the list or jump downto to the forms. Everywhere else in the system this works fin. You cannot even use the FieldFilters. I know that this is not an error. But it’s annoying! And it’s an issue. I’m sure that more issues will come up later. If so then I will post them to the Attain/Financials - Known Issues forum. And I will ask you to do the same. And then we should all start to tell Navision to solved these issues ASAP. This way I hope that Navision will finally do something. Best regards, Erik P. Ernst, webmaster Navision Online User Group
Erik, Don’t look for Navision to improve the debugger or much else in the development area any time in the near or far future. Last year I attended a developers conference put on by the orginization I work for and among the featured speakers were 2 developers from Navision a/s. When asked about future improvements to the development environment within Navision, in particular the debugger, the response was, “We don’t sell a development package, we sell a financials package”. Oh well. Tom
I’m not surprised - I heard this reply once before. In reallity this is just a bad excuse. Not that I don’t understand them - Navision should do what they do the best. Instead they should offer the ability to use Visual Basic of Applications (VBA) instead of C/AL and also to use this development envoironment integrated. But more or less this is the way they are going indirectly anyway. With the Application server and other new tools then we can do whatever we want anyway. Best regards, Erik P. Ernst, webmaster