Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 adds two new interesting features that solves lots of troubles for the developers and makes the customer happy:
- an improved integration with Microsoft Office
- links management for every entities
Now, on every form (so for every NAV entity) you can directly export every record into an Office document, just by pressing some new buttons on the toolbar:
The exported document (Excel or Word) is linked with the NAV data, so you can always click the document title and you will be redirected to the corresponding NAV form.
The export to Word or Excel is done by using stylesheets. There's a new NAV code that takes the XML form description and transform it by using an XSLT template, then the results are transferred to the Office application.
The result is that you can have a well formatted Office document and you can use your personal stylesheet, just by adding it via the new Style Sheet Management form:
The other new interesting features are LINKS. Now you can add links to every NAV entities (records), links that can be local url, internet/intranet urls, BLOBs, files etc.
This permits you to have a document management inside NAV. Every record can have many documents attached to it and the documents are not static, but they can be part of the standard NAV flow (for example, you can have a document attached to a row of a customer order and then retrieve it when you will register the invoice).
You can control this links also via code with the new instructions Rec.ADDLINK, Rec.HASLINKS, Rec.COPYLINKS, Rec.DELETELINK, Rec.DELETELINKS.
Having this document control inside the NAV flow is in my opinion a great and powerful feature.