dimensions

hansika

Hi Experts,

I am Learning navision. I have lot of doubts on dimensions. I am focusing to be perfect on dimensions. I read dimensions . So I have some doubts.
For example I have a company. It has two products 1. Ball 2. Bat
It has 10 customers allover India. It has two departments 1. Sales 2. Purchase. It has 5 vendors throughout India. So I created two Global dimensions . 1. Location 2. Product(Items) .
In dimensions u have 2 Global & 8 Shortcut dimensions.
Now My questions are
1.Why Nav assigns two global as first two short cut dimension ?
2.What is the use of Shortcut Dimensions?
3.Please consider my example explain how can u assign shortcut dimensions.?
4.I assigned two global dimsnsion to customers and vendors.
5.But I am not understanding why navision provide dimension to Items.

Because u assigned Product global dimension to customer , vendor. So through that u can get details which item I sold to customer, which I item I purchased from vendor.
Why navision has provide dimensions to items.
Could u give some detail explanation on shortcut dimensions ?

Thanks and regards

ssingla

The first thing you should do it take a training on Navision or read the functional manuals. Dimension as a topic is very large and is one of the most important feature of Navision. We might not be able to tell everything on the forum but I am trying to help you a bit:

Global Dimension are present as a field in most of the pre-posting and posted table. It helps you filter the data more efficently and generates reports quickly. Shortcut Dimension helps in Data entry as you can define the values directly in the lines. As global dimension also needs the same feature so by default they are made as shortcut dimension also.

Dimension to item is also required if you want to analyse the data on the item like Location wise Item sale/purchase, Area wise item sale purchase.
Item Category dimension is used to group the items on their categorie and generate reports in Inventory analysis.

Just a tip of the iceberg. Look for the manuals or training.

jlandeen

As ssingla pointed out this is a very large topic and a critical one for Navision. However there are lots of considerations when using or working with dimensions (as suggested you may want to consider some training or reviewing the functional manuals).

One thing I think I should really point out here to someone who is new to Dimensions is to be careful where & how you use them. They really are great for reporting and the fact that you can attach as many as you want to a transaction can be useful. However I always recommend using as few dimensions as possible in your transaction. The reason for this is that overtime your posted dimension tables will grow much larger then your transaction tables. This then negatively affects performance.

Example: if you are always tracking 20 dimensions on each item transaction, for each record in you Item Ledger Entry (ILE) you will have 20 in your Ledger Entry Dimension Table. Over time this will grow performance can decrease. Say after a few years you have 10 million ILE records there will be 200 million recoords in the dimension table. This could be a huge waste of space and database resources.

hansika

Hi Ssingla,

Thanks for u r valuable information. I would like to express one thing . That is i read dimensions manuals. But the result is little bit.
That's why i throw my query to MIBUSO World. Please understand my problem. After i read the manuals i throw it. U can observe my query i written very clearly about each point. that is what i could not understannd.
why it is taking global dimen as first two short dimensions ?
What is the use of Short dimensions ?
So I am wondering just what are the differences.
It would help a lot if you could give me a couple of actual examples with my products as u like.
Understand this fresher probelm.

Thanks and regards

jlandeen

Basically there are normally 8 shortcut dimensions on document records. However only Shortcut Dimension 1 & 2 are actually stored on the table. This means that you can filter by them.

The other 6 default dimensions can be used on forms and journal lines. For example on the Item Journal (Form 40) there are all 8 dimension fields availble to be shown. The first 2 fields are actually stored on the Item Journal Line table while the others are only accessed through the form. Then by default any of the other dimensions are accessed via the Line -> Dimensions menu button.

Normally you would want to make the 2 most used dimensions as Global 1 & 2 so that you can sort lines, entry & document records by them.

hansika

Thanks jlandeen,

Now i understood the reason. even i read the Dimension combination i could not get. I tried alot to understand this dimensions. But not possible.
Could u explain what is main purpose of this Dimension combination .
Take any example explain with that. Understand this fresher problem.

thanks in advance

ssingla

Dimension Combination are used to control the use of wrong dimension on the entries.
If we have 2 dimensions a) Area b) Item Category

Area Dimension has the following value : i) North India ii) South India
Item Category Dim has the following value : i) Bat ii)Hockey Stick

If our North India sells only Bat then we will block South India and Bat in the dimension combination with the option of "Limited".

If we want to block the posting of Area Dimension with Item Category Dimension i.e. a entry should not have both the dimension then it will be done using "Block Option.

The relevant portion of help is:

By using dimension combinations, you can set up how dimensions can be used together, for example, in a journal or a document. A company may wish to control the way in which dimensions are combined on an entry. By defining combination restrictions, you can select whether dimension combinations can be used in all circumstances, only in some circumstances or not at all.

This is useful if a company has business rules about what information can be combined on an entry, for example, that users may not post invoices when they have attached both a department dimension and a project group dimension to an entry. You can also restrict the use of a particular dimension combination, dependent on which dimension value combination is being used for the two dimensions.

I think it makes sense and the help seems to be quite logical.

idiot

Just like to add that dimensions are not the most efficient way to do things...
Look at what the objective is...sometimes adding a field to the table works better...Think along the lines of reports as well...

jlandeen

Yes that is the one downside of Dimensions. They are stored in a seperate table so you have to link to them or look them up, which does not help you if you need to sort documents by them.

This is why it is important to select the 2 most critical dimensions as Global 1 & Global 2. Then in the cases where you need to filter by a specific dimension code you can add it as a regular field as required. Not perfect but it's a simple modification. It's just a matter of identifying all of those filter scenarios (normally on posted & unposted document tables).