Config / Overview / What is New

What is New

In this section we describe the new functionality of each version. This is not the complete technical changelog, but meant for people using the module to get an overview.

Version 4.00

Anveo EDI Connect 4.00 has a lot of improvements and new features.

User experience

Business Transactions

We want to make it as easy as possible for the end-user to find his transaction data, to see the status and to navigate to the required information in the system. Previous to version 4 there was the logging, where the end-user could find each step of the processing logic, but this is more technical than required by many users. For that reason we decided to add the new concept of Business Transactions.

Role Center of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central – Showing EDI Business Transactions

The overall idea is to represent the state of a document in a single line, a Business Transaction. Each of these transactions belong to a new setup table, the Business Transaction Type. The Business Transaction Type defines what general processes exists and the entry points. We discuss the details in the chapter Business Transactions.

UI Improvements

There are several small changes to improve the usability. For example, we’ve updated the FactBox in the EDI Document to represent the information better that is required by the end-user. We also but some work in making it easier to work with the new browser based clients in all versions. We will see further improvements on that topic with the next release.

Jobs (“Zero-coding”)

With the business transactions we’ve added a way to export data without the need to add fields to track whether it was already exported. In the past you had to add boolean flags to all outgoing documents, tracking whether it has to be exported and if there was already an export. The new functionality can take care of that in a lot of scenarios. Giving you the opportunity to setup standard EDI workflows without a single line of coding or modifications to the base objects of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016. We discuss the details in the chapter Business Transactions.

Mapping Setup

There are a lot of small changes and improvements to the mapping setup. One big change is only sometimes noticeable, we changed the way SourceExpr and DestExpr are handled to a fully typed engine. This should improve the performance and stability and make the system more robust to language changes.

General Functionality

Table Data Filtering

We’ve changed the way you access post-processing data. There is a new property Data View, which allows you to filter the record to all records of the table, the post-processing record, the business transaction record or a record by a named filter. Selecting
Named Table View will give you access to the named table view field, like before. This change is backward compatible. On upgrades we will set the new property to Named Table View and keep the table view name.

Role Center of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central – Showing Table Properties in EDI Mapping

Table Limit

If you read data from a table there is a new advanced property called Limit Count. Setting this property to True will give you the option to limit the count of records that should be read.

Create Linked Documents

The property Master Table was renamed to Create Linked Documents. You should set this to True whenever you want to link other tables to this instance or when you want to be able to navigate from the
Business Transaction or EDI Processing Queue to the record.

Link Errors to Tables

There is a new property Register Errors On Instance which enabled that all following errors are linked to this table instance.

Init Functions for Temp Tables

On temporary tables you can now specify a function which returns an ANVEDI Variant that holds a RecordRef that is used as the initial values. This is a very advanced topic and only needed in special cases.

Post-processings

There are new post-processing types to support the new Business Transactions.

Build-in functions

There are a lot of new build-in functions. We will only discuss one of them, but there is a new section build-in functions in the manual.

There are new build-in functions to compare to values to each other. This will allow you to use lines of type Conditional to do basic conditional branches. If you try to compare two different data types the second one will be casted to the first one. With these new function you do not need to use the “second table” workaround for IF statements anymore.

Mapping Transport / Import and Exports

We replaced the old import and export functionality for mapping data. You can import old backups with the new systems and the old report is still shipped with the module, but deprecated.

The new functionality allows you to specify in much more granularity what you want to export. On imports you can see the data contained in the backup and decide what to import. You can find more details under Backup and Transport.


Role Center of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central – Showing EDI Configuration Export

Error Handling

We improved the build-in functions that you can use, for example, from check mappings. There are three new command types:

  • INFO
  • WARNING
  • DEBUG

Which will allow you to create log entries. All log commands, including the existing ERROR, now support multiple placeholders to use values from the mapping inside the error message. You can also specify an Error Code, which you can use to access the log information. It is now also possible to explicitly specify the table the error should be assigned to.

Acceptable Errors

We’ve also introduced a new error type, that will break the processing, but can be accepted by the end-user. This allows you to define checks that will break the processing, but can be marked as accepted/ignored by the end-user.

Object Names

We’ve prefixed a lot of the objects with “ANVEDI” to prevent name clashes with other modules. To be backward compatible this does affect most, but not all object names. We will streamline the names in the “Extension” version with the next release. Anveo EDI Connect will be available as extension for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central only. We will not support older Dynamics version as an NAV Extension.

Parallel Processing

In general we do not recommend the processing of several EDI processes at the same time. With the new release we’ve tried to limit the time we are locking our own system tables, making it possible to run multiple processes at the same time. All tables used inside the mappings will still be a limiting factor. If you can, we still recommend to avoid parallel processings.

Mapping Versioning Support

With the new available enterprise versions of the module, we have added support for versioning of mappings. There are two modes available a simple one and a revision safe one, where a mapping that was once executed cannot be modified anymore. We’ve added a section Mapping Versioning, where you can find more information. If you want to use the new functionality you’ll have to get a new license, feel free to contact our partner team to get more information.

Converter Changes

There were some changes to the base module that will affect all mappings. We strongly recommend that you test all your mappings after upgrading before executing the upgrade in a live system.

In the following sections we will list the changes to specific converters.

EDIFACT/X12

We’ve tried to improve the error messages inside the converter. We also changed the behaviour of loops, if they have a minimum repeat set. We recommend setting a min repeat to all tables inside an EDIFACT mapping, where it makes sense. It will result in processing the segments and not only checking them, which will improve the performance and error messages.

We’ve updated the EDIFACT importer, please download the standards with the new downloader. As we fixed some issues it makes sense to remove already imported standards and import them again, before building new mappings.

There is a new function EDIFACT.SKIPSEGMENTS which you can use, if you want to skip data without processing it, up to a known element.

XML

There is a breaking change in the XML converter, if you’re using namespaces on imports. We will now use the namespace information to identify import elements. This required all lines to have the correct namespace information set. The benefit is that you can process files with different prefixes, as they are now considered equal.

The other change is that an empty Content node will now result in a full output of the tag. If you want to get a collapsed output, you can use the property Conditional Output on the content. You can use the Conditional Output on the element to prevent the tag from being shown.

ZUGFeRD

ZUGFeRD is only supported in installations using FOB files (prior or equal BC14). We do not offer an Microsoft Dynamics Business Central compatible Extension of our ZUGFeRD solution.

The ZUGFeRD components have been updated and need to be upgraded. The PDF License is now set outside of Dynamics using a License Manager provided by the PDF components manufacturer.

We’ve changed the way ZUGFeRD files are created. Because there is a COMMIT in many sales invoice reports errors could result in the false creation of an output file in older versions. We now check, if the conversion was successful before creating the output file.