Timestamp field available in tables in NAV 2016

October 06, 2015     1 minute read

If you open a Navision table from SQL server you might have noticed that a timestamp field is available which is a hidden field and was not accessible from Navision in the earlier versions, but with the release of NAV 2016 they made this available to NAV users and you can access that from the Navision, add filters and write code against it.

**How to add a timestamp field**

In order to access the timestamp field we need to add a custom field to the table with datatype **biginteger **and we can name it anything but in the properties of the field and we need to set the new property **SQL Timestamp **to yes.

Whenever you add a record to the table a row version number is generated for that record and stored in that field.

[](http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-r6bwR5oH5g0/VhSRvxnLdnI/AAAAAAAAJsM/v9ltF6dIiMk/s1600-h/image%25255B5%25255D.png)

One important note you can only read the timestamp field we added and use if for filtering purpose or other purpose, **but cannot write the data to the field.**

The typical usage of this field according to Microsoft help is

A typical use of the timestamp field is for synchronizing data changes in tables, when you want to identify records that have changed since the last synchronization. For example, you can read all the records in a table, and then store the highest timestamp value. Later, you can query and retrieve records that have a higher timestamp value than the stored value.

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