Import and Export To NAVision [closed]

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I have to assign a task to a team member to programatically write data to Microsoft NAVision and also read from it. Specifically we will be writing data that is in one of our systems into the customers NAVision financials module, and this will be on a periodic batch basis, say on a weekly basis.

I have programmed against Sage before where I have provided an XLS output that has been in the expected format by Sage and the system administrator imports from Sage.

Is there a similar process for Navision? Sepcifically fincancials?

I would prefer to write my data to a file and have someone else input that data to NAVision. Would also prefer a data dump from NAVision (Excel or XML) so that I can read it back into our system. I don't want the risks associated with pumping data directly into a financial system.

Our system is Java based and would prefer not to have to use .NET if possible.

Options?

Answer 1

The first thing you need to find out is what version of NAV the customer is using.

Earlier versions (I think pre 4) only allowed data to be imported or exported via a Dataport object. This supported delimited file structures csv, tab e.t.c Later versions of the software also now have XMLPorts, which as the name suggests allows XML files to be imported or exported.

Both of these solutions would require development work inside of NAV as there are very few standard import/export objects of either Dataport or XMLPort. These are normally written by the NAV solution center that provides support for the system or occasionally some companies I have worked with do have internal staff with this knowledge.

Expanding further on this there is also capability to read and write directly to Excel spreadsheets, but this approach can be painfully slow as it uses the Excel COM Interop objects to achieve it.

Answer 2

It really depends on the version of Navison you are using and if your customer has programming rights in the system at all(!). It is very likely that they don't.

It also depends if the weekly import is done by hand each week or if it should be 100% automated. Manually started imports/exports work well with dataports.

Often in booking systems imported data is imported in to special tables ("ledger") from where it is booked into the real system that counts after someone has looked at them. As you can discard the data from those ledgers I would not worry too much about pumping data into a live system this way.

If your licence allows programming, you could write/read from/to text files and write your own import/export, which will be more flexible. I'm personally created all kinds of imports and exports. We have one example where Navision pulls a certain email address and looks for special email attachments which it then imports. We have called web services or provided our own. The older "Classic Client" versions also offers read and write access via a C/FRONT interface. This way you can automate data import/export completely. Most of these rely on .net modules, however.

Hope this helps. If not, post the version of Navision and decribe the planned export-/import in detail.