Microsoft Dynamics NAV Interview Questions and Answers

Navision (Dynamics NAV) is the original ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a global enterprise resource planning solution that provides small and mid-size businesses with greater control over financials and can simplify supply chain, manufacturing, and operations. The business system can be easily customized for your industry, your company’s unique needs, working processes and your employee’s individual tasks.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV delivers integrated functionality to provide support for:

• Financial management
• Manufacturing
• Distribution
• Supply chain management (SCM)
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Warehouse management (WM)
• Sales and marketing
• Human resource management
• Project & Resource management

 Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 offers a range of new feature as well as deeper interoperability across the Microsoft ecosystem. Most importantly, this latest version of Dynamics NAV is deeply integrated with Office 365 and includes built-in intelligence. This makes it easy to use, compliant to specific industry needs, and helps companies make better business decisions. Some important features are:

• Keeping the momentum with user tasks.
• Flexible and on-the-fly posting to general ledger from documents.
• Employee Ledger Entries
• Preconfigured Excel reports
• Updated integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales
• QuickBooks File Import
• Integration API
• Synchronize Vendors with Lexmark ICS
• Power BI reporting
• Dynamics NAV Universal App runs on even more devices
• Previewing reports on multiple supported browsers

The Microsoft Dynamics NAV software is composed of three major components (three-tier architecture):

Data Tier: The Database Server, a database that stores the Microsoft Dynamics NAV data

Middle or Server Tier: The Application Server, which is a service that manages all business logic and Communication of Microsoft Dynamics NAV’s operation.

Client Tier: The Client(s) is the actual user interface into Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Through the Microsoft. 

Dynamics NAV Portal Framework, NAV 2013 supports the following clients:

• Windows Client
• Web Client
• Web Service Client
• SharePoint client

It additionally supports a NAS services client for programmatic access

C/AL also known as Client/server Application Language) is the programming language used within C/SIDE the Client/Server Integrated Development Environment in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.C/AL is the tool used to define the processes by which data is manipulated, to define the business rules that will control the various applications, and to control the flow of all the logical processing sequences.

C/SIDE (Client/Server Integrated Development Environment) is the development environment for Microsoft Dynamics NAV / Navision and is short for Client/Server Integrated Development Environment. The actual development language is called C/AL.In daily use C/SIDE is referred to as the development platform for Navision as integrated into the client software of Navision.

C/OCX is an application interface to allow integration between C/AL and a properly defined OCX routine. This allows access to many ActiveX controls available from third-party vendors.

C/Front is part of the Navision SDK, and can be installed from the Navision Client CD from either the Devkit or SDK folder, depending on the version of Navision. One version of C/Front must be installed when using Jet Essentials with Dynamics NAV. The version of C/Front should match the version of the NAV Client installed (the version of the executables).

The Dynamics NAV Object Designer is the development tools which allows to change/customize the different objects in Dynamics NAV / Navision.

When specific things happen to the application objects, the system automatically activates a trigger. Inside a trigger, developers can add C/AL code if they want to modify the default behavior of the application object or extend its functionality.

C/DART is a database recovery tool for analyzing and repairing C/SIDE databases. Basically, you used C/DART to open a Navision database. C/DART does not check if the data base is corrupt or not, and lets you connect no matter what.

The Microsoft Dynamics NAV Open Database Connectivity (NODBC).The advantages of the NODBC is that it’s very easy to read data from the system into applications such as Microsoft Excel. But it’s IMHO not very good to update the application with. Especially since you cannot access the business logic in NAV, only the tables and records.

Ensure that you are knowledgeable on current trends in your industry by looking at reports from yearly conferences, what influencers are saying on social media and news sources that regularly discuss updates and the effects of them. Make sure you have remembered the main points and can easily discuss them.

Autosplitkeys is a form property that automatically generates key values for primary keys that end with an integer type field.

The Import Worksheet is one of the few forms which you cannot design in Dynamics NAV that is used during binary import of objects. If the import file contains only objects that are either new or have been updated, they will be imported. If, however, one or more objects with the same ID Property already exist, a decision must be made about what to do. The Import Worksheet displays information about both existing and new objects, and lets you decide how to handle conflicts.

NAV was one of the first ERP systems to fully implement a multi-currency system. Transactions can start in one currency and finish in another.

Flow field: It is a powerful feature of C/side database system. Underlying concept of SIFT that increase performance. Flow field data does not gets stored in the data base

Sum Index Field Technology (SIFT) is a very clever method of providing instantaneous response to user inquiries. SumIndexField is associated with a key in the table. Each key can have up to 20 associated SumIndexFields. When you design your database, you can associate a decimal field with a key as a SumIndexField. This tells the Database Management System (DBMS) to create and maintain a structure that contains the accumulated sum of the values in a column. SIFT has been designed to improve performance when implementing such activities as calculating customer balances

The web services can be used by applications such as Excel to call Navision business logic via codeunits or read and update data through Page objects. There are three types of web services

Page Web Services: When a page is exposed as a Web service, a default set of eight methods is exposed to developers so that they can manage common record handling, such as Create, Update, and Read. A page Web service offers the built-in concurrency and transaction management, as opposed to codeunits.

Codeunit Web Services: Codeunit Web services provide the developer with the most control and flexibility around the behavior of the Web service.

Query Web Services: When you expose a Microsoft Dynamics NAV query as an OData web service, you can query that data to return a service metadata (EDMX) document or an Atom Pub document.

SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan) Web Services: This web service is published either Microsoft Dynamics NAV pages or codeunits as SOAP services. SOAP web services allow full flexibility for building operation-centric services.

OData (Open Data) Web Services:  This web service is publish either pages or queries as OData services. The OData standard is well suited for web service applications that require a uniform, flexible, general purpose interface for exposing create retrieve update delete (CRUD) operations on a tabular data model to clients.

Used to store bitmaps and memos. Max size can be 2 GB.

• FINDSET: for getting multiple records, you intend to loop through them
• FINDFIRST: for getting only the first record in the filter, just one record
• FINDLAST: for getting only the last record in the filter, just one record

At same time two different users are trying to modify the values in same table. For the integrity and security of data, Navision won’t allow multiple users to modify the values in same table at a time.

A Role Center is a type of page on which you can place different parts. Each part is a container in which you can host other pages or pre-defined system parts, such as an Outlook part or parts for adding tasks, notifications, or notes.

In NAV2017, Microsoft introduce lists of new functionalities. From that list one of the new feature is Microsoft introduces 5 new Role Centers pages.

• Security Admin Role Center
• Sales & Relationship Manager Role center
• Accountant Role Center
• Team Member Role Center
• O365 Sales Activities Role Center

Role center Configuration and Personalization: The difference between configuration and personalization is that configuring a Role Centre changes the user interface for all users with the same profile, whereas personalizing a Role Centre only changes the user interface for a single user. This means that configuration is something done by the System Administrator or the System Manager mostly at implementation time, whereas Personalization is something done by the individual users depending on the priorities of their day to day life and it will not affect the role centers of other users.

• Tran’s header should be printed before the first line of its data item on every page but the first.
• Tran’s footer should be printed after the last line of the data item on every page but the last.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server is a .NET-based Windows Service application that works exclusively with SQL Server databases. Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server provides an additional layer of security between clients and the database. It leverages the authentication features of the Windows Communications Framework to provide another layer of user authentication and uses impersonation to ensure that business logic is executed in a process that has been instantiated by the user who submitted the request. This means that authorization and logging of user requests are performed on a per-user basis.(see more MS doc)

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 provides a security system that allows administrators to manage user access to the objects and data in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV database. Because the Microsoft Dynamics NAV database is on SQL Server, the Microsoft Dynamics NAV security system and SQL Server security system work together to help ensure that only authorized users can gain access to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV database. The security system contains information about the permissions that have been granted to each user who can access a particular database.

This information includes the roles that the users have been assigned, as well as any permissions that they have been granted to individual users.

There are four different levels of security:

• Database
• Company
• Object
• Record