Dynamics User Group

It would be nice (IMHO) if Navision added two fields to the object-designer.
1) User-id, to keep track of the person who made the (last) changes to an object and
2) Open, to allow multiple developers to work in the same database without worrying if your changes will be saved or someone elses.
I think Navision should not allow an object to be opened twice (at the same time) for editing.

Am I the only one who thinks this should be addressed (or rather am I missing something that covers this) or is this really a problem?

Dennis van Es
PerCom: Research & Development BV
The Netherlands

We talked to Navision a long time ago about having the USERID of the last user who saved an object in the object list. They didn't seem interested in the idea at the time. Your second suggestion is a good one also. Another issue with multi-user development, and the one that has by far caused us the most grief, has to do with object caching. The situation is as follows:

1) User A modifies object 1.
2) User B modifies object 1.
3) User A runs/modifies object 1 again.

User A in step 3 gets the version that was used in step 1. The changes made in step 2 are invisible to this session. If the action in step 3 is a modification of the object, the changes made in step 2 are thrown away. This was supposed to have been fixed in a previous version of NF but never was.

We sometimes have 3 or 4 developers working in the same database at the same time and have had to come up with some cumbersome manual procedures to overcome this issue. It would be nice to concentrate more on the actual work we have to do and less on the basic housekeeping tasks that the database should take care of.

Navision's lack of insterest is probably because they don't do development in Navision. Many of the US developers I've talked to prefer to use an external text editor.

One of the things that was stressed at my developer's training class was that you should NEVER do development in a shared database. Always use a standalone database for development and test and then release it to the shared database.

Our team uses Visual SourceSafe to coordinate access to objects to prevent overlapping modifications. And we have a table of assigned object numbers that we can go to when we need to get a new object number.

-jp

I found a utility to track open windows onhttp://myNavision.net. (download section)

Window Watcher is a utility to track open windows, the tool is designed to work with Navision.

Light version is freeware and supports 1 client, the "pro" version supports open windows on several clients on the LAN.

I've tried the single user version and it works just fine...

Best Regards

Janus Rossing

Hi,

The only workaround available at the moment is to set your Objectcache to zero. This way your objects are not cached, so there is less of a chance that changes are layered on top of one another.

Alex

Our dev team typically services up the database when they are developing a project with multiple developers for easier and faster integration testing. They claim they don't have problems with mulitple developers trying to change the same objects because they follow a build plan. Each person is assigned to modify/create different objects. The work is "properly partitioned." I would not be surprised if Navision can't see the need for this because they have the same attitude about how development SHOULD be done.

Never-the-less, this problem is real and some teams have it. What if every time you were going to work in an object, you edit the version number and put your initials in the front of the other versions? At least that would be a simple system to inform others that you intended to change the object.

Since we are dreaming about changes to the development system, I sure wish Navision would save all the versions of all the objects. Perhaps with some sort of purge function. We use Visual Source safe for version management. However, it really would be great if this was integrated into the dev environment.

Jim Hollcraft
NCSD, NCSP, MCSE, CNE, MCP, MST
aka Skater
http://drilldot.com
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