If you’ve taken the leap from NAV Classic to RTC you might be left longing for a bit of shortcut functionality that was previously available. Luckily, all it takes is some simple configuration and you’re on your way to pushing the role-tailored experience with Dynamics NAV even further. In addition to customizing the Navigation Pane in NAV to quickly access lists, you can also customize the ribbon in NAV to quickly access important functions and reports.
A Note About Changes to Role Centers
The sky’s the limit with what you’d like to do with this. However, bear in mind that when you tweak the Role Center page, you make these functions available for all users that are connected to that Role Center.
How to Customize the Ribbon in NAV
Let’s say you want to run a Customer Report, Aged Accounts Payable Report, or Trial Balance. How does the ribbon help you do that?
The default Home ribbon can be somewhat daunting and cluttered, with lots tabs and plenty of functions and reports that you don’t necessarily need:
You can right-click the ribbon and click on Customize Ribbon… (pictured below) to sort through the mire and reduce it down to a svelte ribbon with only the items you need the most.
Now you have a good starting point for your Actions and Reports, for example:
Customize the Ribbon: Surfacing New Functions
When you were customizing your ribbon you might not have seen the specific function you wanted in the list of available actions for this Role Center (on the left pane). In this case, we want to be able to create a Purchase Order, but you can see that under “New Document” we’re unable to add it in:
To add it , go to the Development Environment (or ask your NAV partner) and navigate to the Role Center Page object. In our case, we’re using the Accounting Manager Role Center, so we’ll just go to that Object and click “Design:”
Once there, go to View > Page Actions:
Then, create a new line under the “NewDocumentItems” ActionContainer called “New Purchase Order:”
Then click on the Properties for the new line you added:
Here, we change three fields:
- the RunPageMode to “Create”
- the Image to whatever icon you prefer (I chose the CreateDocument one)
- the RunObject to point to the Page where you want to run the create function (in our case, the Purchase Order page)
After doing this – and saving and compiling and restarting NAV – we now see a new icon magically appear in our ribbon:
What about quickly accessing reports?
We can go ahead and do the same for reports. Let’s say you have a custom report called “Magic Report” that you’d like to add to your Report tab. Go through the same motions to Design the Page object and this time in the Page Actions, go to the Reports ActionContainer and enter a new line accordingly:
Edit the Properties of that line item as well to have an icon and run the Report object. Then when you save and compile and restart NAV, you’ll see your report in the ribbon:
Much More than Just Documents and Reports
I think by now it’s becoming apparent that, depending on the RunObject command, you can run the different NAV objects that exist. Some other examples of things you can run are:
- Custom XMLports:
Custom Codeunits:
Hopefully, the above has both comforted and inspired you to take full advantage of what is, in my estimation, extremely powerful replacements for the ill-fated “Shortcuts” of yore.
