How-to: Change the CustomSettings.config file - Web Services

For the second time in little over a week I ran into the same situation where, after updating the CustomSettings.config file and restarting the NAV Server, RTC was still connected to the previous database. The first time this happened I eventually got RTC connected to the right database by restarting my computer.

As I didn't want to restart everything again today I decided to pick this up a bit more intelligently. So I searched the forums but, although I came across various worthwhile info, it did not provide me the right hint. So I wondered how I had done this before. I could clearly recall that I had been changing reference to databases like this before and I was quite sure that simply restarting the NAV Server was enough. And then I realized that only recently I had configured my default NAV Business Web Services to automatically start up.

"Might it be," I asked myself: "that both servers should be stopped before the updated CustomSettings.config file could take effect?"

Trial and Error

A simple trial of this thought proved me wrong! I stopped both services and after that restarted them again. Aha.

Some More Background

To better understand this all I had a look in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Developer and IT Pro Documentation. Specifically these sections gave me some better understanding:

1. Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web Services
2. Configuring Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server

Apparently both NAV Server and NAV Business Web Services are linked to each other and if either one of them is still running the original config file is still 'active'.