Actions Overview

Article
06/05/2016

In Dynamics NAV, actions are displayed at the top of each page in the ribbon or in the navigation pane. In this topic, you learn about different types of actions, and how you can enable users to quickly locate the actions they want to use.

Pages can have the following actions.

Types of actions	Used on	Description	Example
Actions	Role Center, list, card, and task pages	User tasks	Post a sales order
Navigate	List, card, and task pages	Links to other pages in Dynamics NAV.	Prices
Reports	Role Center, list, card, and task pages	A list of available reports.	Customer Top 10 List
New	List, card, Role Center pages, and task pages	Actions that appear under the New group. Opens a new Dynamics NAV document.	New sales invoice
Promoted Actions	List, card, Role Center pages, and task pages	Provide quick access to common tasks that appear under the Home tab.	Post and print a sales order
Home Items	Role Center pages	Menu items on the Role Center navigation pane.	Customers
Activity Buttons	Role Center pages	Menu buttons for a secondary activity, such as posted documents.	Posted sales invoices

Caution

If you change an object, for example, an action to an action container, you must also change the ID of the action. The ID serves as a reference, and must reflect the object.

Each page has a different set of actions depending on the page type, and the processes that the page supports. In order to create the appropriate set of actions for a particular page, you should have a good understanding of your customer's business processes.

Each process in an organization has several actions associated with it. You should try to create a full set of actions that mirror all tasks and processes that are performed.

Example: The Sales Orders list page at CRONUS International contains all actions related to processing sales orders. During user configuration and personalization, some of these actions may be hidden or promoted to the ribbon. Therefore, you must create a full set of actions for the customer.

Types of Actions

The following sections describe actions available in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Windows client and Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web client.

Actions

The Actions tab is displayed in the ribbon on all page types, and contains relevant tasks for the current page. Some examples from the Customer page are as follows:

Sales Invoice
Sales Quote
Sales Credit Memo
Ledger Entries
Invoice Discounts
Prices
Line Discounts

They are regular daily tasks. Therefore, they must be on the Actions menu, and promoted to the ribbon.

You can add actions to the Actions menu, group actions together under action submenus, or promote them to the ribbon. You cannot create submenus or promote actions on a Role Center page.

Navigate

The Navigate tab is displayed after Actions in the ribbon. Rather than providing tasks for the user, this tab provides additional information by taking the user to a specific page in Dynamics NAV.

Note

You should not add a Navigate action to a Role Center page.

Report

The Reports tab is displayed after the Navigate tab on the ribbon. The Reports tab lists the reports most relevant to a page. If a user does not require a Reports tab, then the tab is hidden. Sometimes it is relevant to promote the most important reports to the Home tab to save the user from too many clicks.

New Document

The New action is often displayed both in the Home tab and in the Actions tab. You can use this action to open new documents within Dynamics NAV. When you create a New action in Action Designer, you must use the NewDocumentItems SubType.

Example: On the Customers page, if the order processor wants to create a new invoice, she can open the New page directly from the Actions tab. This is useful as she creates new sales invoices daily.

Home Items

Home Items are actions appear under the Home button, on the Role Center navigation pane. This navigation has a tree structure, and each node in the tree links to a list page.

The user Role Center is like a home page, and home items in the navigation pane are links to the user’s most useful list pages. For more information, see Setting Up the Home Button and Home Items

Activity Buttons

If there are too many Home items to fit on the Role Center without scrolling, then activity buttons can be used to group other important processes together.

Example: The Order Processor Role Center could have activity buttons called Approving Web Orders, or Sales Forecasting. These are secondary activities for the order processor, so they do not have to be included under the Home button.

Each activity button has its own navigation pane, with links to list pages and can be configured just like the user Role Center.

For more information, see Creating Activity Buttons for the Navigation Pane

Promoted Actions

Promoted actions are actions that are set up on the Actions, Navigate, or Reports tabs in the ribbon, but are also configured to display on the Home tab. Although the actions are set up on the Actions, Navigate, or Reports tabs, you can choose to hide them on these tabs and only show them on the Home tab.

The Home tab is always displayed first so promoted actions provide quick access to common tasks, because users do not have to browse through a menu to access them. You can promote any command from the existing actions menus to the ribbon. If there are no promoted actions, the ribbon remains hidden.

Promoted actions can be grouped. For more information, see How to: Define Promoted Action Categories Captions for the Ribbon.

Each promoted action has an icon associated with it. You can accept a default icon for your promoted action or decide to use a larger icon that makes it more prominent to the user. Use the Properties window in the Action Designer to set the size and location of an icon.

Example: On the Sales Orders list page, Post is promoted to the ribbon, and included in the Process group. This helps the order processor in her work, because posting sales orders is one of her most important daily tasks.

Actions at Runtime

An action can trigger code to run, such as posting a document or otherwise modifying a record in a table. When a user chooses an action, one of the following pieces of logic will happen in addition to the code that the action itself triggers:

If the page is empty and no longer shows any records, the page is re-initialized with default values.
If the page does show records, and the current state is within the page filters boundary, the OnAfterGetRecord trigger is executed on the page.
If the current record that the page showed is now outside the filter but there are other records within the filter, the OnFindRecord trigger is called and the OnAfterGetRecord trigger is run on the next record with the given filters.

The logic runs in the transaction that the action triggered. This can cause the application code to result in users locking the whole table when they thought they were only modifying one record.

To avoid users accidentally locking tables, you can use the SetSelectionFilter function before your code passes the record variable to the processing codeunit, for example. The following code example illustrates the code on the OnAction trigger on an action on a page.

IF CONFIRM('Are you sure you want to call this codeunit?', TRUE) THEN  
  BEGIN  
  CurrPage.SETSELECTIONFILTER(Rec);  
  CODEUNIT.RUN(50000, Rec);  
  END;  
END;

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