The first step in my last NAV upgrade was to back up customized tables. Although having database backups throughout your upgrade process is a no brainer, my focus in this post is backing up locally tables that contain non-standard fields. Having the heavy customized tables readily available in the same database, somewhere in the range 50000-99999 it can prove useful.
For example, let’s say the table 21 Customer Ledger Entry in my customer NAV 2009 database has a few non-standard fields in the range 50k or some other range. My plan is to have an exact copy of this table with ID 50000, table that I can carry forward until the upgrade process reaches NAV 2017.
Having the original data allows me to:
- re-construct any field that might have gotten lost or overriden during the upgrade (through a Forced sync without an upgrade codeunit or some other faulty process) or
- perform conversion validation like comparing the balance for each customer in the original table(now saved in the 50k range) with the value from the upgraded table.
To backup the table I start with opening the original table (21), copy all fields, create a new table in the 50k range (60007) and paste all the fields. In the new table we don’t need any business rules, therefore we can select all code lines and delete them.
I would do the same for all tables whose data I want to back up.
If your backup set includes like mine, hundreds of tables, I would create a new table(50000) where I am planning to keep all original-backed up table pairs. For example, I can have pairs like table 21 – table 60007 in the new table:
Next we need to populate the new table 60007 with original data.
Create a new codeunit and traverse table 50000. For each row execute the following function:
This method copies the value of “Normal” fields from the source table(21) into each correspondent field from target table(60007).
