Importing a Unicode file into NAV through a dataport

josephdewey · 2012-07-03

Is there any way to import a Unicode file into Navision?

I'm trying to do a Dataport to import a unicode file with some fields that have Chinese characters, into a company that is set up in Navision to support Chinese (non-Unicode in NAV). But the Dataport doesn't recognize the Unicode characters, since Navision is a non-Unicode program (until NAV 2013).

I could do a conversion of the file before I import it, through Notepad++, to convert the file from Unicode to the Windows Code Page, so Navision could import it.

But, I need to import this file multiple times per day, so I need an automated solution, instead of just a manual solution.

Thanks in advance for your help!

ufuk · 2012-07-04

You can write a dll for conversion and call it in Navision by automation. I prefer this approach if the automation is run by a service or only in the same machine. Otherwise registering the dll can be a problematic issue.

josephdewey · 2012-07-05

Good thoughts. Anybody have details on how I could do this, or where I could go for resources?

ufuk · 2012-07-10

Sorry for the late reply, I was on holiday

For the dll part you can search for encoding conversion and writing a com visible dll in dotnet related resources.

Basically the result will be like the following lines in csharp:

namespace ChangeColl
{
    [ComVisible(true)]
    [ProgId("ChangeColl")]
    [ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.AutoDual)]
    [Guid("F104F5DC-9F9F-4BD3-9B77-C5AFEA75881C")] 
    public class ChangeColl
    {
        public void SetColl(string pFilePath)
        {
            if (File.Exists(pFilePath))
            {
                string text = File.ReadAllText(pFilePath,Encoding.Default);
                File.WriteAllText(pFilePath, text, Encoding.UTF8);
            }
        }
    }
}

create your bat files to install and uninstall the dll easily. (using regasm and gacutil)
install.bat file can have the following lines:

set regasm=%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\regasm.exe
set gacutil=.\gacutil.exe

%regasm% "ChangeFileCollation.dll" /tlb:-ChangeFileCollation.tlb
%gacutil% /i "ChangeFileCollation.dll"
pause

and in navision write a function like:

IF ISCLEAR(ChangeColl) THEN
  IF CREATE(ChangeColl) THEN BEGIN
    ChangeColl.SetColl(pFilePath);
    EXIT(TRUE);
  END;

EXIT(FALSE);

Hope this helps.

Importing a Unicode file into NAV through a dataport

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