Dynamics NAV – Application Code Upgrade

Article
05/20/2015

Microsoft introduced a new feature called Application Merge Utilities (AMU) with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015, which help partners upgrade their custom solution (application code and metadata) from one version to another, or from one cumulative update to another.

Why?

Microsoft plans to release new versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV every 12 months and in addition, Microsoft will be releasing cumulative updates every month. Applying these updates to your existing NAV database or upgrading to newer version often results in conflicts that can be difficult to manage!

Example:

Lets consider that the base/original version of NAV 2013 has a table (ID: 777) with fields: ID, Name and Phone Number. Assume the NAV customer requests for customization on this table to store the name as First name and last name separately. Hence, This base version table will be customized/modified as per the business requirement with following fields ID, First Name, Last Name and Phone Number. Now, if a cumulative update or newer version of Dynamics NAV is released with an additional field in this table: ID, Name, Email ID and Phone Number, there will be a conflict and a 3 way merge needs to be done.

Application Merge Utilities makes this merge process very simple!

In the following video, I have tried to show how to perform application code upgrade of lightly customized Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 database to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 using Compare and Update PowerShell commands shipped with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOf6vs3exug

Some of the benefits of using this method includes:

No dependencies on Dynamics NAV Servers or Databases. Operates on TXT files directly.
Can be used across versions, and is backwards compatible with C/SIDE
Additional capabilities availble to manage languages and captions, and to split/join TXT files

Dynamics NAV – Application Code Upgrade

Additional resources