NAV User Sessions when designing/refreshing reports

Wednesday, January 31, 2018 - By Jon Gardner

There has often been confusion over the years about Jet Express, Essentials or Professional consuming a Dynamics NAV licence user session whenever a Jet Report is either designed or refreshed.  Many users have simply not been made aware of this fact and so are surprised when they get an error message that there are insufficient NAV user sessions available to run their Jet Report.

For the avoidance of doubt, the consumption of Dynamics NAV license sessions depends on what version of Dynamics NAV you are using and what type of data source you are using….

With NAV 2009 R2 or earlier Jet uses a NAV license session whenever you refresh a report.
If a user has the NAV Classic Client open and refreshes a report in Excel then they will consume two license sessions.

With NAV 2013-2016 and a Web Services data source a license will be used each time a users refreshes a report.
If the user has the NAV 2013-2016 RTC open and refreshes a report in Excel then they will consume two license sessions.

With NAV 2013-2016 and a SQL Server direct data source a license session will not be used when users refresh reports.

Another good reason to connect to your NAV database using the Direct SQL connection.  And it’s faster too!

We hope this clears it up – but if in doubt please contact us by clicking here or leaving a comment below.