Dear All,
I am actually planning to give technical certification exam for Navision and thus want to know as to what is Automation in navision and how and when is it used.
regards,
Naval
Automation allows nav to communicate with other applications. If you’ve looked thru the application designers guide you have seen examples like “Writing a letter to Microsoft word” or “Graphing with Microsft excel”.
or articles like “Talking with Navision: Say Hello to Navision and Expect Navision to Be Polite”
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms952182.aspx
Check those & see if you still have questions
This is what the C/SIDE book says:
Automation provides a seamless interface to applications outside Microsoft
Dynamics NAV 2009 without user intervention. For example, a letter can be
created in Microsoft® Word whenever certain conditions take place, such as
when a new customer is added.
The main purpose of using Automation is to provide a seamless interface to
outside applications without user intervention. A second reason for using
automation is to save development time which also reduces the cost of
development.
Requirements
There are several requirements to use Automation, they are as follows:
• The program to be used as Automation must be an Automation
server. Examples of automation servers include Microsoft Word,
Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft® Outlook®.
• The Automation server must be loaded on the computer that is being
used for development and all other computers that use the
application that use the Automation.
Installation
The following steps outline the procedures for using an Automation server from
C/SIDE.
- Declare the top-level interface (class) of the Automation server as a
variable of type Automation. - Declare all the other interfaces (classes) as variables of type
Automation. - Use the C/AL function CREATE on the variable declared in step 1.
Do not use CREATE on any other variables. - Use the methods and properties of the Automation server in the
C/AL code. Write the code in this step. The syntax and the
semantics of these methods and properties are described in the
documentation for each Automation server. Using these methods
and properties in C/AL does not involve any new or modified
syntax. - Use the C/AL function CLEAR to destroy the top-level object.
Otherwise, it is destroyed automatically when the variable goes out
of scope.
Considerations
There are two major concerns when deciding where to write code that uses
Automation.
• The first is the fact that an object that uses Automation can be
compiled only if the Automation server is installed on the machine
where the compilation takes place. This means that if an object is to
be recompiled and modified on a machine where the Automation
server is not installed, developers have to modify the code drastically
to compile it again. Therefore, it is recommended to isolate code that
uses Automation in separate codeunits.
• The second concern is performance. There is some overhead
involved in using an Automation server by using the CREATE
function call. If the Automation server is to be used repetitively, it
gives better performance if the code is arranged so that the
Automation server is created only one time, as opposed to using a
series of CREATE/CLEAR function calls.
Because these two concerns sometimes clash, there may be instances when
developers must make some trade-offs based on the actual context in which their code is used.