Text encoding enhancement for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

The STAEDEAN Business Integration Solutions team recently augmented the text encoding capability in the STAEDEAN Business Integration Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV to support a greater range of text encoding types. This change helped a customer upgrade a legacy system and will be useful in other situations where text encoding is important.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 provides support for multiple Text Encoding options, such as MS-DOS, UTF-8, etc. Previous builds of the STAEDEAN Business Integration Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 supported only Unicode. As you know, Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems.

The solution was good and many partners implemented it successfully. However, one of our partners had blocking issues with a customer’s legacy system. That made it difficult to upgrade that legacy system.

To resolve this problem, we made a change in how the most recent build of the Business Integration Solutions supports text encoding. We enhanced the functionality to support other text encoding types and make it more generalized.

Here are the most interesting details about this text encoding enhancement:

The XMLTOTEXTTRANSLATOR and the XMLTOCSVTRANSLATOR activity are enhanced with an option to select the Encoding as shown below:

Now the activity supports the text encoding types supported by standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV, including Unicode, UTF8, and ASCII. However, in case you want your file to be written in any other specific text encoding type, you can select Encoding = Others and specify the Codepage ID.

To know more about various encodings and code page numbers, please refer to the topic Encoding Class in MSDN.

With any feedback or questions about our Business Integration Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, please send me a note at psharma [at] to-increase.com or contact STAEDEAN.