navision did not provide

austin

Hi to everybody,

U have filed customer name, vendor name, customer address,Item description..........
Why navision only provide text Size 30. because around the world item description, custmer names, address...... may have above 50.
This is well known matter to navision developers. But why they put text size 30.
Why dont they put 80 as text. What is the reason.
Is there any performance issue?

Of course u have Description 2........in item teble,customer table, I Know.
why dont they put 80 as text. Think about this issue.
I am very curious to know this issue. #-o

thanks

Thanks and regards

cnicola

Hi Austin,

As far as I know there is no performance issue.
I think it has more to do with some standard development rules established a long time ago: code is 20 (except trace codes who are 10), names are 30 and descriptions on lines are 50.
So it is what it is and if you need to (i.e cannot work with Name 2 as well) then you can just expand it. Not complicated but not 100% straightforward either since there are a lot of places to change except the main table itself.

kine

And if you look into NAV 5.0, all names and adresses are now Text 50. ;-)

cnicola

Now why would I want to do that?

Miklos_Hollender

I think the reason is that for a long time they didn't really think outside the EU/US box and the length of company names is for example quite culture-related. The first time I found 30 chars is not enough when we had a client who imported stuff from China and the vendors had the company name prefixed with the area or territory, so they were generally called something like Big Blue River County Thousand Golden Flowers Clothing Co. I was, like, wow, how do you put that on a business card So I guess it took a while till they realized this

kine

Miklos Hollender wrote:

I think the reason is that for a long time they didn't really think outside the EU/US box and the length of company names is for example quite culture-related. The first time I found 30 chars is not enough when we had a client who imported stuff from China and the vendors had the company name prefixed with the area or territory, so they were generally called something like Big Blue River County Thousand Golden Flowers Clothing Co. I was, like, wow, how do you put that on a business card So I guess it took a while till they realized this

It is just historical thing. But I do not know how long the fileds were in DOS times...

David_Singleton

kine wrote:

It is just historical thing. But I do not know how long the fileds were in DOS times...

In the DOS version, there were issues with making tables too big. When I first released Navision in Central Europe, I expanded all Description and Address fields to 50. Not realizing that I took many tables to the border of the table size limit. When 3.53 was released, and a few fields were added to the Sales Header, we could not upgrade. And that didn't mean just a couple of customers, that meant a few countries ... :whistle: oops.

At that time it was very critical to keep control of tables sizes, and thus the rules.

Really you shouldn't expand existing fields, because for sure it will bite you later. BUT Microsoft really should take a closer look at the need, and work on a better solution. Personally I would have left Description 2 at 30, and aimed to deprecate it, and then change description to 60. (same for name/name 2) but then there is the issue of the compress function and the use of an array.

idiot

Harddisk space, database size was a premium in those days...
The famous "640KB of RAM should be enough for everyone" by Bill Gates illustrated the state of technology back then...

It's been long overdue for a proper revision of Navision to incorporate the current technological benefits...And then there are those who still advocate the technology of the past...

The problem of field lengths has cropped up too many times.
The decision to increase current field length or add fields has been debated over too many times as well.
Navision is not the only software affected by this issue...

I fully agree with this:

David Singleton wrote:

BUT Microsoft really should take a closer look at the need, and work on a better solution. Personally I would have left Description 2 at 30, and aimed to deprecate it, and then change description to 60. (same for name/name 2) but then there is the issue of the compress function and the use of an array.

but not the statement before this. The situation is unique to individual companies & regulatory requirements of interfacing to other systems & will have impact on the path chosen. A good example is whether SQL statements are used somewhere.