Drilling Back to Source Data in Dynamics GP 2013 using Dashboards

In this article by Mark Polino, author of Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013, will walk you through the deployment of a dashboard. Once you deploy a dashboard, it's inevitable that someone will want more information. They won't believe a number and will want to know the detail that makes up a balance. A great way to manage this is to build a couple of dashboards. Usually, this looks like a primary dashboard with secondary dashboards that break out more information about sales, cash, or departments. We've done this on a very simple level with our Revenue and Net Income tabs. They provide additional detail to expand on the main dashboard numbers.

Another great way to deal with the need for detail, and to take your dashboard beyond what everyone else is doing, is to allow users to drill down into specific transactions or accounts in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013. In this article, we will look at drill down options including:

• Hyperlinks

• Using drill downs present in GP 2013

• The structure of a drill down

• Building your own links with Drill Down Builder

• Drill downs in complex environments

.NET 4.5 Extension Methods on IQueryable

In this article by Shawn R. McLean, author of Instant .NET 4.5 Extension Methods How-to , we learn about the extension methods on IQueryable. IQueryable is used to operate mainly on databases. IQueryable<T>are an extension from IEnumerable<T>, hence, we can call all extensions and methods of IEnumerable<T>. A query using IQueryable can be built up on over time, before it hits the database. The query is executed once you execute an eager function such as ToList(), looping the data or attempting to use the values. IQueryable is used by providers such as LINQ to entities or LINQ to SQL.

Validating and Using the Model Data

In this article by Vinod Krishnan, author of Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide, we will take a look at validating and using the model data. Validating data is important as business depends on the data that gets stored in the database. So how do we validate the data? Validation is something that makes sure that valid data is getting stored in the database. Validation could be anything from comparing two fields in a table to multiple validations on a single field involving different columns from a different table.

In any other framework, we would end up writing a lot of code even for a small validation. But in ADF, we do little or no coding at all, and most of the validations are achieved declaratively.

In this article, we will learn the following topics:

• Declarative validation
• Groovy expressions

Migrating Data

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 is an Enterprise Resource Planning ( ERP ) system targeted at small and medium-sized companies. In this article by Laura Nicolàs Lorente and Cristina Nicolàs Lorente from the book Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, we will see which tools can be used in Dynamics NAV to migrate data into the system and how to convert data to meet NAV requirements. We will look at tools such as:

• RapidStart Services

• XMLport

• User defined tools

We will also see what kind of data is commonly migrated to Dynamics NAV and which strategies can be used to migrate it. The kind of data and strategies are listed as follows:

• Master data

• Open entries

• Historical data

• Open documents