Confusion with Drop Shipment functionality

howieb4

I have been testing creating a Drop Shipment in NAV2013 R2. What I have been doing is creating a Sales Order, then manually creating a Purchase Order, clicking on Drop Shipment in the ribbon and selecting Get Sales Orders. That process is working normally.
What I thought I could do, was in the Sales Order Lines section, clicking on Orders, then Purchase and have the PO created automatically. When I do that, I get an error that the Purchase Order No. is missing from the Sales line. If I do this same thing on the Sales order from the above example, the PO that I manually created opens.

Am I wrong in assuming that the Orders>Purchase Order function automatically creates the PO needed to fulfill the Sales Order? And if it does do that, why am I getting the error? What am I missing?

FDickschat

Yes, you are wrong in assuming that

The SO -> Drop Ship -> PO function simply looks up a previously created drop ship PO but does not create one.

To create a drop ship PO you can use one of 2 methods:
- As described by yourself: Create a PO manually, Use Get Sales Order,...
- Use the requisition worksheet, Drop Ship, Get Sales Orders Function to get all sales order lines for which a drop ship PO has not been created yet into the worksheet and create POs out of it.