FlowFields and Dynamics Connector

This week we had an interesting challenge in a project for one of our Dynamics customers.

They were using the Connector for Microsoft Dynamics to send the information between NAV and Dynamics CRM.

After the software was installed, properly configured and tested we discovered  that one of the monitored fields would not synchronize properly. The field in question was "Sales (LCY)" on the Customer Card which was mapped to "Turnover". The users would post sales transactions in NAV, that in turn would update the value in the monitored field - but no changes showed up in CRM. What could be the reason?

Those who know NAV and its nice little tricks have probably already guessed correctly: this is all to do with FlowFields.

As MSDN nicely put it:

"FlowFields are a powerful feature of the C/SIDE database system, and strongly influence the way C/SIDE applications are designed. FlowFields … increase performance in activities such as calculating the balance of your customers".

And further on:

"FlowFields are not a permanent part of the table data".

For us, the above meant that the Customer record to which a virtual Sales (LCY) field related wasn't aware of any changed to its value because that field didn't belong to the records itself. That value was dynamically calculated based on the records in a different table (Cust. Ledger Entry in this case).

To address this or similar integration issues with mapped FlowFields, just do the following:

• Create a new field of type Date in the monitored table and call it e.g. "Last Transaction Date";
• In the function responsible for posting into customer ledger, add two lines of code updating the Last Transaction Date with today's date and then committing the change.

This would give the system an indication that something has changed in relation to a Customer record and that in turn would trigger the update via the Dynamics Connector. "Simples!"

Creating a new field for the purposes of triggering the integration is probably optional. Our tests demonstrated that any modifications to the Customer record start the update. For instance, a manual change to the (non-monitored) Address field was enough to kick off the integration.

For further details on Microsoft Dynamics NAV or ProStrategy, contact us at 1890 886675 or e-mail requestinfo@prostrategy.ie