Shortcuts – where are they stored and how to copy them

Shortcuts was first introduced in NAV 4.0 – and did made the world of Navision a bit easier 🙂

If you have customers or work in a company with a lot of users, you might wish to set up a template user.

The creation of a template user is pretty simple. Just create a new user and add the shortcuts you would like to have.

Now – where are the shortcuts stored? You can locate them in the table 2000000061 User Menu Level in the field Object. Unfortunately the field Object is a blob field – so all you see is *.

If you export the Object field to a file – you will notice that the shortcuts are stored binary and that all shortcuts are stored in one blob field.

This is not very editable!

Now that we know that all shortcuts are stored in one blob field – but is it possible to copy or move the shortcuts to another user?

Yes – you have several ways to do it:

1. In it is within the same database you can simply use copy & paste
2. If it is between servers you can use export / import

The export can be done like this:

uml.SETRANGE(ID,'templateuser');
IF uml.FINDFIRST THEN BEGIN
  uml.CALCFIELDS(Object);
  uml.Object.EXPORT('c:\menulevel.bin',FALSE);
END;

where uml is a User Menu Level record
.

and the import can be done like this:

uml.SETRANGE(ID,'copytouser');
IF uml.FINDFIRST THEN BEGIN
  CLEAR(uml.Object);
  uml.Object.IMPORT('c:\menulevel.bin',FALSE);
  uml.MODIFY(FALSE);
END;

where uml is a User Menu Level record
.

Before doing the import – you must be sure that a record for the specific user exists in the User Menu Level table. The entry in the User Menu Level table is done automatically when the specific user logs into Navision.

This means, that “old” users should already have an entry in the table, whereas new users must perform at least one login before you copy the User Menu Level.

I have tried to copy the record without user’s login in a least one time – but the system overwrites the record.

Now you have successfully copied the shortcuts from a template user to another user.

The downside of this method is that you cannot those which shortcuts to copy, you can only copy either all shortcuts or none.