NAV 2013 upgrade. Existing pages in NAV 2009??

ttnavision

Dear All,

I am posting the same post again here as I think it is much more appropriate in this forum

I would like to ask a question re NAV upgrade from 2009 SP1 to 2013 RTC.

We currently use Pages in NAV 2009 Classic and publish these for use in third party web application. When we use the FormTRansformation tool to convert Forms to Pages how can we merge both the pages ie. the existing pages and the newly transformed pages.

Has anyone ever thought about this please?

thanks in advance to everyone who provides feedback.

Tyron

mohana_cse06

Form Transformation tool will create Page in same ID as it is in Form
Ex; Form 50000 will be created as page 50000

Do you mean you have already used 50000 ID for another purpose?

Marijn

The whole look and feel of a page in the RTC and webclient is completely different than the traditional forms. You need to account for that, so from a UI perspective, I believe your best bet is designing the pages from scratch in 2013. Traditional forms usually contain a lot of business logic code. It is a best practice to put BL in codeunits anyway and only put code in pages which deal with displaying stuff. You will also find that many statements and code blocks need to be changed to work in 2013. So even when the transformation tool works and you will find a way to merge your pages, I think you end up with a messy situation. You need to do a lot of refactoring anyway, and starting clean is the best way I think. Page designing is, in contrast to reporting, fairly easy when you learn the properties and keep things simple.

Another method would be to take the pages which you currently expose as webservices as a starting point. You then need to add all the controls which you want to show to your users, order them and make any controls invisible which you don't want to show but which need to be exposed for the webservices.

Really, I think it's best to use separate pages for UI and webservices and create both of them from scratch in 2013. Sometimes, you need to tweak things which messes up either the UI or breaks down the webservices. Any control which you will show to your users will also be exposed by the webservices. Even when you make them invisible and disable them. Many times this is unwanted for security for example. These things are way easier to deal with when you design a good looking UI page and a seperate page for the webservices.

ttnavision

That was excellently helpful Marijn!

Thanks!

Will follow your steps