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Hi Folks,

I'm currently investigating the Navision COM interfaces which can be accessed from outside Navision.
Søren Nielsen found some interesting information and blogged it on his blog: http://gotcal.com/

His test programs are a bit messy and programmed in C#, I couldn't see what was actually happening in his GotCAL.CSIDEInstaller class. Although most of the functions called are imported from C(++) DLLs C# does some strange magic on them.

I will publish my findings in this forum thread hoping some people find it usefull and maybe provide me with more information.

It seems Navision is advertising an object in the COM running object table. The running object table must fetched by the following API call:
The rot object contains a method to get an enumerator to enumerate the monikers to the running objects:
When Navision is running you'll see three instances with different names but it seems it doesn't matter which one you choose. Weird. You can find the displayname of the moniker by calling:

When you've choosen the moniker which you would like to use you can get the object.
This object has multiple interfaces:

• IUnknown
• IMarshal
• {00000020-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
• {0000013D-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
• INSHyperlink
• INSObjectDesigner
• INSApplication
• INSAppBase
• IConnectionPointContainer
• ISupportErrorInfo

(I found these by calling QueryInterface and using the interfaces found in the registry)

Now I really hope to find all declarations of these interfaces but for now I've only used the INSObjectDesigner from Søren. The IDL seems to be:


You can use this class by calling:


When you are using the methods with IStream parameters please note I'll have to rewind (Seek to 0) the IStream. Oh, the IStream can by constructed by calling an API.


As I wrote, I hope this is usefull for someone and if someone has more information please tell me! Especially about the other interfaces.

Update!

I've found a great tool called NDR INSPECTOR (by Vito Plantamura) which extracts the definition of the navision interfaces!
It can be downloaded here: http://www.vitoplantamura.com/index.asp ... rinspector

This is the IDL as far as I know it:


notes:
- GetForm returns a null pointer in form
- I haven't made an implementation of INSCallbackEnum yet so I couldn't test it
- INSHyperlink->proc4 returns a large (constant) number, I don't know what it is.
- The first and last parameter of INSAppBase are empty in my current setup

Great news. Love the tool from VitoPlantamura's site. Thanks for the update.

Each of the three instances belongs to the application, the database and the company respectively. Try to start the client without opening a company or a database, respectively and you will find only 2 or 1 instance, respectively. You can also guess that from the DisplayName of the moniker.

Recently I investigated the INSApplication interface and discovered some nice possiblities. Through the INSRec interface you can retrieve the value of any field of the record, which is shown in the client's currently active form (may be with INSEnumCallback it is possible to step through all open forms, but I 've got no idea how...). As there is no typelib information available, you have to implement the interfaces in the usual way (be aware that the names of the methods are not official in any way) - here is the declaration for C#:


A new concept in the whole discussion is the MarshalAs directive, which permits the use of complex data types within COM Interop.
Note also that the declaration of the interfaces is sufficient. We don't have to declare any COM coclasses because we are not creating new objects (NAV client must be already running).
Here is a (minimal) sample C#-code-snippet which retrieves the value of field no. 2 (Name) for the open Customer Card. Note that the customer card has to be opened and should be activated.

The RunningObjectTable.GetRunnigCOMObjectByName function can be found here:
http://www.mycsharp.de/wbb2/thread.php?threadid=36340
During my tests, I had a problem that every now and then the customer card was not the active form. In this case IF == null is returned and you will encounter a System.NullReferenceExeption in the above code. To get the customer card the active form, just switch to the NAV client and move the customer card around (do not work in full screen modus) in order to make it the active form (it is not sufficient to just click into the card form).

great work gerdhuebner thanks a lot for sharing!

INSApplication.GetForm returned only 0 for me, did you do something special in Navision (open a certain form or something like that?)

Well, as I mentioned above, in certain cases IF == null (in the sample code above), but meanwhile I think that this method is mainly useful, if you have opened the form before with the INSHyperlink.Open method.
The following code worked for me in all cases. All you have to do is to start NAV Client and open a company (not even a form).

With the INSHyperlink.Open method you can open an arbitrary form showing an arbitrary record (just create a Link for an open form with the Edit, "Copy Link" from the main menu of NAV, paste this link into a texteditor and customize it - for some reason the direct paste into the visual studio editor doesn't work for me).
With that method you can draw arbitrary data from NAV Client (supposed you have got a form in NAV Client).
It would be nice however, if there would be a possibility to close the form again after use... - as a workaround one can use OnTimer trigger with Currform.Close to close the form automatically after 1 sec, e. g.

Note that the data retrieved with the INSRec.GetFieldValue method can be manipulated within the form. It seems to be that the Rec variable of the form is used to get the field data. But the fields of Rec can be set manually in the OnAfterGetCurrRecord trigger of the form, e. g.
So unfortunately this method cannot be used to retrieve for example the license no. of the NAV license from the virtual "License Information" table 2000000040 in a safe way...

Argh! great topic!

I'm trying to make an alternative object designer.

Anyone knows how to implement the new/design/run buttons maybe using one of these interfaces? If we would now that we could build a much better object designer with many more functions.

And why you want to do that, when the current designer is going to be changed?

The INSHyperlink interface Open returns an integer value.
What happens if you pass this returned value into the Proc4 function of the same inteface? The first parameter also accepts an integer.

Well, I never tried it out... - but, by the way, if you are developing a new object designer, don't forget a function to filter out only the objects that are different (newer/older) than already existing objects. This is, I think, the most urgent issue to be improved.
Concerning the COM Interface for objects, etc. I would be mainly interested in a way to retrieve the actual NAV license no. from a running client (like the info that is displayed, if one clicks Extra/License Information), because this would allow something like a copy protection for addon components like COM automation servers, or OCXs, etc.) - this information cannot in general be found in the license file of the client, because the NAV license file (fin.flf) need only to be on the NAV server or in the SQL database, respectively, so the information can only be retrieved from a running NAV client process...

The system will connect to a kind of 'source safe' environment. Will be much more advanced then this. And what to think of extra long version list codes?? A lot more features then you can currently imagine.



I gues the SERIALNUMBER C/AL instruction isn't good enough . Maybe C/Front has a function? The function might be hidden somewhere in those interfaces.

Maybe it is a good idea to create a DLL that supports the interface we have now with just the Proc functions, put it in downloads of Mibuso so everyone interested can start testing those functions and see what they do and post there findings in the download topic?? With all gathered knowledge we can create a more programmer friendly DLL. Who knows what extra possibilities come available.

Has someone created something like this already??

INSHyperlink.proc4(out int a) returns the handle of the main Navision window.
so proc4 could be renamed to GetNavWindow, GetNavWindowHandle or something like that.

by the way, great investigation!

Nice work. I already had my own function for this, although i have had an ocasion where this function did not prove relaible. So i think i'm going to replace the function with this one in the future.


More functions please !!

on the next page..