Creating a Custom Dataport

Dataports can have tricky requirements. There was this case where we were creating an export file for a system in Unix and the requirement was to have some special characters in the file being created so how does on do it as we know we can use the char datatype to handle special or invisible characters in navision.

How we handled this was that we created a dataport with the table to be exported and did not define any datport field for this, then on the pre-dataitem trigger we initialized an outstream variable as

CurrFile.CREATEOUTSTREAM(fpCustomer);

then on the OnAfterExportRecord one can directly write to the export file of the dataport as follows:


//writing to the text file
fpCustomer.WRITETEXT(Customer."No." + FORMAT(Delimeter) ); //customer
fpCustomer.WRITETEXT(Customer."No." + FORMAT(Delimeter) ); //No
fpCustomer.WRITETEXT(Customer.Name + FORMAT(Delimeter) ); //Name
fpCustomer.WRITETEXT(Customer.Address + FORMAT(Delimeter) ); //Address
fpCustomer.WRITETEXT(Customer."Address 2" + FORMAT(Delimeter) ); //Address2
fpCustomer.WRITETEXT(Customer.City + FORMAT(Delimeter) ); //City
fpCustomer.WRITETEXT(Customer."Post Code" + FORMAT(Delimeter) ); //Post Code


Well by the way on InitDatport trigger one can also assign the dataport filename as

CurrDataport.FILENAME := SRSetup."Customer Export Folder" + '\' + FileName;

handy when the dataport is automated.