NAV Web Services

So we have been doing some integration work between a custom piece of development and NAV2009. Our NAV Dev setup some code and exposed it as a series of web services. To test them a simple console app was written and everything was good.
Then they tried running the console app on a different machine to the NAV web service, all of a sudden nothing worked.
We went back over the config settings of the console app and confirmed that it was pointing to the correct URL for the web service, which it was, but for some reason when we ran it it kept trying to look for the service on the localhost. This turned out to be a setting in Visual Studio that by default embeds the URL of the web service when you register it, who knew..... well one of our .NET devs did thankfully. So by changing the GenerateDefaultValueInCode to False your solution will look to the Config file instead.

So after changing that and rebuilding the app we tried again. Still not working. After much testing with little joy we tried some simple tests on a different set of machines, on these we managed to get the following




Turned out that Windows firewall was blocking the port we were using, so after adding an exception to the firewall everything worked fine.
So next time we do some of this stuff we are going to make sure the server has the port unblocked and that we remember to tell Visual Studio not to imbed the web service URL (its default action) so we can control it with a config file.

Webservices in NAV2009

Anyone that has been reading up on NAV2009 cannot have failed to have noticed that NAV can now publish Webservices. I know clever developers have been building Webservices for NAV for a while now, but they have been building them from scratch. NAV2009 gives a simple form where you can expose a Codeunit, or a Page(the new object type used by the .NET client).
One of the examples in the Application Developers Guide publishes a Page built against the Customer Table. The example then goes on to build a simple console app that inserts, Modifies and deletes a customer record, displaying the results between each stage.
Now I know very little C# and the example has a number of bugs in it but even I have managed to get this work and add some very basic error catching in a few hours. One of the devs here told me it would have taken him somewhere between a day and 2 days top achieve the same in the past.

So the example I am talking about.
In NAV open Object Designer and run form 810
Add Page 21 and call it Customer

In Visual Studio 2008 I started a ConsoleApp Project.
I then added a reference to the WebService by Right Clicking Service References and selecting Add Service Reference. I then Clicked the Advanced Button

I then clicked Add Web Reference

I then add the webservice and named it WebService(not very original I know)

Once I had this I could start with the C# Code. Admittedly most of this was copy -  pasted from the example. But as I said there are a few bugs that I had to resolve, plus I wanted some simple error trapping

   1: using System;

   2: using System.Collections.Generic;

   3: using System.Text;

   4:  

   5: namespace ConsoleApplication1

   6: {

   7:    // import newly generated Web service proxy

   8:    using WebService;

   9:   

  10:    class Program

  11:    {

  12:        static void Main(string[] args)

  13:        {

  14:            //create instance of service and setting credentials

  15:            Customer_Service service = new Customer_Service();

  16:            service.UseDefaultCredentials = true;

  17:  

  18:            //create instance of customer

  19:            Customer cust = new Customer();

  20:            cust.Name = "Customer Name";

  21:            //Next line will throw an error. Comment out to get successful passing

  22:            cust.Address = "12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456";

  23:            Msg("Pre Insert");

  24:            PrintCustomer(cust);

  25:           

  26:            //insert customer

  27:            //service.Insert is wrong. Correct and added a Try/Catch for errors

  28:            //service.Insert(ref cust);

  29:            try

  30:            {

  31:                service.Create(ref cust);

  32:            }

  33:            catch (Exception ex)

  34:            {

  35:                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);

  36:            }

  37:            Msg("Post Insert");

  38:            PrintCustomer(cust);

  39:  

  40:            //create filter for searching for customers

  41:            List<Customer_Filter> filter = new List<Customer_Filter>();

  42:            Customer_Filter nameFilter = new Customer_Filter();

  43:            nameFilter.Field = Customer_Fields.Name;

  44:            nameFilter.Criteria = "C*";

  45:            filter.Add(nameFilter);

  46:  

  47:            Msg("List before modification");

  48:            PrintCustomerList(service, filter);

  49:  

  50:            cust.Name = cust.Name + "Modified";

  51:            //service.Modify is wrong. Correct and added a Try/Catch for errors

  52:            //service.Modify(ref cust);

  53:            try

  54:            {

  55:                service.Update(ref cust);

  56:            }

  57:            catch (Exception ex)

  58:            {

  59:                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);

  60:            }

  61:  

  62:  

  63:            Msg("Post Modify");

  64:            PrintCustomer(cust);

  65:  

  66:            Msg("List after modification");

  67:            PrintCustomerList(service, filter);

  68:            try

  69:            {

  70:                service.Delete(cust.Key);

  71:            }

  72:            catch (Exception ex)

  73:            {

  74:                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);

  75:            }

  76:  

  77:  

  78:            Msg("List after deletion");

  79:            PrintCustomerList(service, filter);

  80:  

  81:            Msg("Press [ENTER] to exit program!");

  82:            Console.ReadLine();

  83:        }

  84:  

  85:        static void PrintCustomerList(Customer_Service service, List<Customer_Filter> filter)

  86:        {

  87:            Msg("Printing Customer List");

  88:  

  89:            //conduct the actual search

  90:            //service.Find is wrong. Correct and added a Try/Catch for errors

  91:            //Customer[] list = service.Find(filter.ToArray(), null, 100);

  92:            Customer[] list = service.ReadMultiple(filter.ToArray(), null, 100);

  93:           

  94:            foreach (Customer c in list)

  95:            {

  96:                PrintCustomer(c);

  97:            }

  98:            Msg("End of List");

  99:        }

 100:  

 101:        static void PrintCustomer(Customer c)

 102:        {

 103:            Console.WriteLine("No: {0} Name: {1}", c.No, c.Name);

 104:        }

 105:  

 106:        static void Msg(string msg)

 107:        {

 108:            Console.WriteLine(msg);

 109:        }

 110:    }

 111: }

 112:  

This is an area I think will make my life a lot easier as I get involved in integration projects fairly often. 








As I get more knowledge I'll post up more examples.