NAV / C# Application interaction

Johannes_Nielsen

Hi all

We have a custom product contruction-application (C#) we are looking at integrating with NAV 5.01.

The basic idea is to create/configure a product in this application and have it create it as an Item with associated BOM, in NAV, by the push of a button.

What technologies should we be looking at, COM, Webservices or..?

Regards

matttrax

If you're integrating it with 5.01 it's a little harder than doing it with NAV 2009 / 6.0.

It depends on what type of database they are using (Native or SQL). With Native you could maybe use C/ODBC, but you don't get the business logic validation which is important for these kinds of things. With SQL you can do .NET automations and call stored procedures, but again, no business logic.

With 2009 you can do the built in web services. It makes it really easy.

Johannes_Nielsen

Thanks Matttrax

We're running SQL.

Sounds like Webservices are the thing.
Guess i should be looking at that upgrade til 2009 as the primary task.

Might it be possible to do a quick, partial upgrade to get the webservices support in 5.01?

jlandeen

There are a number of integration options that you can use with NAV 5.1 (including web services)....but there are a lot better ones in NAV 2009. It sounds like you are loooking for tightly integrated options that work with NAV and both COM and Webservices could provide that. In both cases you would need to use a Navision Application Server to hang the 2 together.

However once you are running on NAV 2009 you can natively use both Webservices and native calls to .NET managed code (which is Excellent....thank you MS for getting this into the product....now work on Reporting!!).


2 (VERY ROUGH) Architectures you could use are:
1) NAS running a COM wrapper class that can send/retrieve data from your system that runs a synchronization process on a set schedul
2) Use the Commerce Gateway framework to build a MSMQ listener and submit messages to it (this could be supported by a web service)

I have implemented several integrations using the above integration options in NAV 5.0 and 5.0 SP1 so I can confirm they work.

kine

Johannes Nielsen wrote:

Thanks Matttrax

We're running SQL.

Sounds like Webservices are the thing.
Guess i should be looking at that upgrade til 2009 as the primary task.

Might it be possible to do a quick, partial upgrade to get the webservices support in 5.01?

You need only to start to use NAV 2009 R2 executables and enable the 3-tier technology to be able to use build-in WebServices support. I am using webservices even with v3.7 objects (even with 2.6 objects).

Johannes_Nielsen

We're using 2009 clients and 5.1 objects at the moment, so upgrading to 2009 R2 clients should be straight forward.

Thanks alot Kamil! :thumbsup:

jlandeen

The great thing about using the NAV 2009 R2 executables is you get all of the benefits of the new environment that include native calling of .NET classes from code as well as web services.