Understanding Development Environment

We use Development Environment to develop Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 applications. The Development Environment has a similar look if we take Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 as a reference.

The basic object types are the same. We still have seven basic object types: Table, Page, Report, Codeunit, Query, XMLport, and MenuSuite.

Note

I assume the reader knows the basics of these seven objects, and have not included the descriptions in this section, saving space and your time.

Changing the database size

We can easily change the database size if we have sufficient space available by following these steps:

1. Go to File | Database | Alter, and then select the Database Files tab.
2. You will get a window similar to the following screenshot:

   

3. Increase the size in the Size (MB) column with a proper number. Then click on the Transaction Log File tab. You will get information related to the log file size of your database. Look at the following screenshot:

   

4. Change the value in the Size (MB) field, and click on OK.
5. Exit the Development Environment, and reopen.

Database schema synchronization

At certain times, Microsoft Dynamics NAV object designer might contain some modification of objects at the table level and they need to be synchronized to the SQL Server side, because the database is in the SQL Server itself. We have a Schema synchronization feature, which can take care of this synchronization operation as shown in the following screenshot:

Whenever a modification is done in the table in Development Environment, it is stored as a metadata information. And at certain moments in time, you can synchronize the metadata of changes via the service tier towards SQL Server.

Whenever we work at the table level, for example, coding or making some modifications in the fields, while saving, the system automatically prompts the user to synchronize and compile. But there are times when you have done some drastic changes that might result in data loss. The system will not automatically synchronize the objects. Instead, it keeps it in the metadata, and then you can carry out the synchronization operation later. There are three options for synchronization.

To compile an object, you can either press the F11 button from your keyboard, or go to the Menu bar, and click on Tool/Compile. It will prompt you with the dialog box shown in the following screenshot:

With the Later option, you can choose to synchronize later, and Force actually enforces the synchronization process; this might result in data loss. This is an interesting feature, and comes in very handy during the development phase. But these features should be handled with responsibility, since they might result in the loss of valuable data.