Where is that menu option in NAV 2009?

Ever since the Outlook-style menu was added to Dynamics NAV, I have struggled to find the options I want. Eventually I got used to where things were in the standard system but as soon as the end users or over-zealous consultants made modifications to the MenuSuite objects, I found I was lost once again.

So what is the solution? Obviously I needed a tool to help me find the option I was looking for. In my dream world, I could type "Payment" into a search box and have the following results presented to me:

Financial Management | Cash Management | Payment Journals
Financial Management | Payables | Payment Journals
Financial Management | Receivables | Documents | Customer Payment
Financial Management | Receivables | Setup | Customer Payment
Etc.

It would be really nice to then be able to click a button to launch the option and hopefully, by seeing where the option is, commit to memory where the item can be found.

Previously building a solution such as this was too hard (for me). This was mainly due to the export formats available to version prior to NAV 2009. You could sort of do this by exporting the MenuSuite objects as text and then write a program to read the text file and use this information to build the menu paths. I didn’t really want to have to figure out the file format of the MenuSuite export, and I didn’t really want to have to write the program to read it in. It never seemed quite worth the effort.

NAV 2009 has changed things and I thought that the ability to export objects as XML would make this task a lot easier. Unfortunately when I tried to export a MenuSuite in XML format, all I got was an empty XML file – not what I was hoping for. Back to the drawing board!

Then, when I was creating some programming samples for my book on Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 (buy it from amazon here), I discovered that the Object Metadata table has a blob field called Metadata that, for MenuSuite objects, contains the MenuSuite in XML format. How cool is that? Not only can I get the data in an easily-accessible format, but I can also do it programmatically by handling the XML document in the blob field.

If you wanted to see the contents of your MenuSuites in NAV 2009 as XML files, you could run the following Codeunit. Now I have the basic tools for the job, I can create a Page in NAV 2009 that will (hopefully) meet my requirements. I will, of course, post the progress here. Stay tuned.

Here's the Codeunit...

OBJECT Codeunit 91360 Export MenuSuite Objects
{
  OBJECT-PROPERTIES
  {
    Version List=;
  }
  PROPERTIES
  {
    OnRun=VAR
            l_ObjectMetadata@1000000004 : Record 2000000071;
          BEGIN
            // MenuSuite items in the RoleTailored client are stored in the range 1000..1999
            // They map to the Classic client numbers but with 1000 added to the number.

            l_ObjectMetadata.SETRANGE("Object Type", l_ObjectMetadata."Object Type"::MenuSuite);
            l_ObjectMetadata.SETRANGE("Object ID", 1000, 1999);

            IF NOT l_ObjectMetadata.FINDSET THEN
              ERROR('Something went wrong. There was no Object Metadata for the RoleTailored MenuSuites.\'+
                    'This sample only works with NAV 2009.');

            REPEAT
              l_ObjectMetadata.CALCFIELDS(Metadata);
              l_ObjectMetadata.Metadata.EXPORT(TEMPORARYPATH+STRSUBSTNO('Metadata_%1.xml',l_ObjectMetadata."Object ID"));
              HYPERLINK(TEMPORARYPATH+STRSUBSTNO('Metadata_%1.xml',l_ObjectMetadata."Object ID"));
            UNTIL l_ObjectMetadata.NEXT = 0;
          END;

  }
  CODE
  {

    BEGIN
    END.
  }
}