Print and attach report to documents

 

You can now print document related reports and add them as attachments to a document itself. This is particularly helpful if your document goes through many versions that you want to keep a track of.

1. Create a sales quote of 100 bicycles for a customer. There is Attachment factbox to navigate to any attached prints.

2. Release the quote. Navigate to Print/Send -> Attach as PDF. The sales quote report is printed by default and attached to the quote document

Drill down on the attachment to view it

When you convert this quote to order you see that it is also attached to the new order document. Now change the order qty or any other field in the document and save this version of the order confirmation to the order.

When you click Attach as PDF on the sales order you see a list of options because there are those many reports that can be printed and also attached to the order.

Search Pages in Business Central

 Menusuites are old age now with Business Central.

Pages have now come with a new property that makes them found on searching in your client.

The property is UsageCategory with values as below. The values replicate every behavior like the previous Menusuite.

None	The page or report is not included in a search.
Lists	The page or report is listed as Lists under the Pages and Tasks category.
Tasks	The page or report is listed as Tasks under the Pages and Tasks category.
ReportsAndAnalysis	The page or report is listed as Reports and Analysis under the Reports and Analysis category.
Documents	The page or report is listed as Documents under the Reports and Analysis category.
History	The page or report is listed as Archive under the Reports and Analysis category.
Administration	The page or report is listed as Administration under the Pages and Tasks category.

Reset credentials to extension

 I accidentally created my AL project using wrong credentials, which gave me a nightmare publishing it. I wanted to tell the AL project to please forget my previous login and ask me for a new one.

The trick is to clear cache of your previous credentials. Press Ctrl + Shift + P to open up the command pallet and search for clear credentials. Select the one.

Try to publish your app again and it asks for you to enter the credentials again.

What's your Password?

NAV offers its own way of storing Passwords. I am not so much into encryption (right now), but it does seem to not be quite the best way for password protection.  But let's know whats going on here

1. How can you enter/store a password in NAV? For eg; storing an FTP password.

Create a field called Password in a table (just for ease I use inventory setup)
Set the property ExtendedDataType = Masked (This masks the input as shown)

When you try to extract this data eg. as a message, the encryption fails and you see the password in full glory. 

2. So how is User Login information stored in NAV?

The great revelation is Codeunit 9801 - Identity Management

ValidateKeyStrength: When you enter a pwd in the user card, this function perform tests on it. By default NAV needs the pwd to be of 8 chars, at least 1 uppercase, at least 1 lower case, at least 1 number.

GetMaskedNavPassword:  Here's the fun part. If a pwd was set, NAV just displays '********'. Yes.  8 stars. They are not hiding anything. They aren't encrypted values. Just stars. 

Identity Management is good way to get into access and identity areas of NAV.