DiCentral to NAV Connector
The "DiCentral to NAV Connector" is an integration between NAV and DiCentral. DiCentral is a cloud based (SaaS) EDI Provider that allows companies to interface with their Trading Partners (both Customers and Vendors) through EDI. DiCentral handles all of the custom mapping of the EDI documents and any changes required by Trading Partners. DiCentral also allows integration to external ERP Systems and to other systems.
The "DiCentral to NAV Connector” provides integration between Microsoft Dynamics NAV and DiCentral. DiCentral provides a "Gold Standard" XML file of their EDI documents. This "Gold Standard" will change very infrequently and typically maintains full backward compatibility. That means that even if your Trading Partner changes their format frequently, you will most likely not have your ERP system affected. The primary changes that occur to the "Gold Standard" format will be the addition of new fields. The connector makes this very simple to manage. With an unmodified "DiCentral to NAV Connector”, you will only need to import the new maps. If your NAV partner has modified the existing maps they will need to merge the new maps. The "DiCentral to NAV Connector" is delivered with the "Gold Standards" mapped to the most common NAV fields. It is possible to modify these mappings to save the mapped fields anywhere you desire. NAV Partner assistance is recommended for this change.
The functionality of the "DiCentral to NAV Connector" is comprised of several parts. Inside of NAV are traditional NAV Add-On Objects (Tables, Forms, Pages, etc.) provided with the connector. There is a .Net program that runs as a service on your NAV or SQL Server that is responsible for the communications with DiCentral and NAV. It also acts as the timer that triggers processing to occur within NAV. This enables processing of available documents every minute without relying on human intervention, or Job Manager, a NAS or any other timing solution. In fact it is possible to configure the EDI document processing to flow through completely hands off and lights out, although most installations would not process in that manner. There are two additional .Net programs that allow for configuring the service and running in manual mode.
The NAV code is written to be as easily upgradeable as possible. Whenever possible all of the connector code is kept completely out of the Core objects. Any necessary changes made to the Core objects are minimal and well documented. Special codeunits that enable connector partners to attach their custom code to the event handlers is also provided. This enables an update to be applied to the "DiCentral to NAV Connector" without touching Core objects or Partner Customizations. All of this forethought allows customizations to be easily merged and reapplied in the event of a NAV core object update.