Dynamics NAV 2017: New Functionality of Item Attributes

Sometimes, very rarely, but dreams do come true. I guess, this time it happened because so many people were dreaming about the same thing at a time - and finally it happened. Microsoft released Item Attributes as a part of standard functionality, presented in the demo version of NAV 2017, released just few days ago.

If you have access to downloadable version, I recommend to install it and play with it yourself. For those who just need to wait for the official release, I've made a few screenshots to show what it is about.

You can access the Item Attributes by pressing the nice colored action button from the item card or item list page:

Having that pressed, you get into the list of attributes and attribute values that you can assign to that item:

You can drill to the list of existing pre-defined attributes, already setup, and you are able to create new attributes and fill them with values. Let's assign one of the existing attributes to our item:

I'll take "Color" for example. As you can see, the "Color" attribute has a number of values, which you can select and edit if needed. You can drill down to Item Attribute Values of "Color" attribute (note here that as all other dimension values in the system, Item Attribute Values can also be blocked):

I'll select this "Color" attribute to our item and select some value from the drop-down list, offered by the system:

So let it be Red. Unfortunately, it is so far not possible to assign multiple attribute values to the same item card - only one value for one attribute per item:

Note also the "Unit of Measure" field, available for such Attributes as "Width" or "Height" that you can setup while defining the attribute.

Note that there is a new FactBox for the Item Attribute:

What is even more interesting, you can filter out the item list by needed attribute! Press the other action button for filtering:

In the filtering window you would be able to select one or more of the needed attributes and their values  you are interested in:

By pressing "OK" button you will have your list of items filtered out by needed attribute values!

Note how the filtering has been done: it automatically puts a filter by Item No. code into a standard filter with those item codes that contain "Color" attribute with "Red" value.

Please note that you can select an attribute in the filter just one time, otherwise you would get an error:

If you would like to filter out items by several attribute values, you can select multiple values in the filter:

And get your filter:

Now, you will get more items in the filtered list:

Great feature. Now Sales Managers would be able to rapidly search the database of items just by the parameters, requested by customers! When you would need to select a certain item into the Sales Order or Quote - you can quickly limit the list of the items by needed attribute value.

Furthermore, you can also Categorize your items. You can create a hierarchy of item categories and assign item attributes to each item category. When you add items to a category, they will inherit the attributes on the category. This ensures a common set of attributes on related items, speeds up the assignment of attributes to similar items, and allows filtering and navigating related items based on the category.  For more information, see How to: Work with Item Attributes in Help.

Stay tuned and wait for more info on the latest NAV 2017 updates!