Communication Between NAV and Web

ebitas
ebitas Member Posts: 71
edited 2012-11-16 in NAV/Navision Classic Client
I have a client who has several customers that sells his products on the Internet. The question is: how to establish real time communication or link between those websites and my Client's Inventory Table in NAV?

The database in use is NAV 2009 Sp1

Thank You..

Comments

  • MarkHamblin
    MarkHamblin Member Posts: 118
    That's a very broad question, especially without more information on what the "real time link" is for (e.g., read/write? Read Only?). And the link is only part of the equation - security is another big one. You really don't want to open your NAV DB up to the web without putting measures in place to limit the risk of it being compromised. If you're uncertain about how you're going to make NAV data accessible on the web, it's probably best to engage someone that has experience doing it.

    That said, if you want to play around with generating web content based on NAV data, here's an approach that uses Microsoft's Razor framework to put NAV data on the web (accesses data at the SQL level, so not great for updating data):

    http://mibuso.com/dlinfo.asp?FileID=1454
  • ebitas
    ebitas Member Posts: 71
    Thanks Mark for your reply..
    The website will mainly have a read only permission to the Item table in NAV in order to get Item No. Description and Qty on Hand and display the info on the website.

    Thank you for the link you have provided. I'll certainly look it up.
  • MarkHamblin
    MarkHamblin Member Posts: 118
    Based on your clarification, that link probably isn't useful for this specific problem (but is kind of cool anyway). There are a ton of options to do what you want, but here's a simple one that you might consider:
    • Set up a web-facing server running SQL Express
    • Put some decent firewall policies between the web facing server and the NAV server
    • Use SQL Replication to push only the data you need from NAV to SQL Express
    • Create some simple ASP.NET pages to allow the external sites to get at the replicated data
      • Asp.net pages could do something as simple as return a csv list of items, or you could create a web service if the external websites prefer a web service API

    - Mark

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