Dynamics Business Central / NAV Developer Digest - Vol. 437
ArcherPoint’s Developer Digest focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV development. This week’s volume is dedicated to improving performance in Business Central, including better coding practices, performance monitoring, and telemetry.
The Dynamics 365 Business Central community comprises professionals devoted to advancing the success of their customers. Developers, project managers, and consultants collaborate to share helpful information across blogs, forums, and social media sites. From discovering new solutions to finding answers to complex issues, these dedicated individuals are constantly sharing their knowledge with others. At ArcherPoint, we recognize and appreciate this highly engaged community’s creativity, hard work, and collective intelligence. To ensure all users can benefit from their expertise, we want to share their wealth of information with everyone.
This weekly digest presents a collection of thoughts and findings from Dynamics NAV/BC experts and devotees worldwide each week. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.
Learn About Microsoft Copilot in Business Central
Register for a Microsoft Office Hour call on June 6 to learn about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot in Business Central.
Tackling Performance Issues in Business Central Online
DynamicsCon wrapped up last month, and one of the many stand-out sessions was Helpful Tips on Tackling Performance Issues in Business Central Online, presented by Cecile Dinh and Steve Endow. Because this topic is important, we figured we’d gather several performance-related resources together in this week’s Dev Digest. While not exhaustive, this should help developers and administrators get started on improving Business Central performance.
Notes from DynamicsCon
A few brief takeaways from Cecile Dinh and Steve Endow’s presentation include:
Performance issues can come from anywhere: Hardware, network, code and extensions, data, and user behavior.
Hardware/Network – Network speed, latency, bandwidth, even your browser, can impact system performance.
Code/Extension – Think about performance in every line of code you write. Take advantage of caching, and collapse controls like factboxes so the system doesn’t have to keep re-calculating values in these controls. See Guidelines and Patterns for Development for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Some examples of areas to address include:
- Tables vs Table Extensions
- Partial Records
- SetLoadFields
- By Val vs By Ref
- Cache calculated data
- Page background tasks
- Query object
- API pages
Data – Processing a thousand journal entries is one thing, but 5 million entries can really slow things down. How much data do you process daily?
User Behavior – Multiple power users on the system, running batch processes, and the bosses printing reports all at the same time can impact performance. Observe when the system slows down and the processes that are active at that time.
View the presentation deck here.
Performance Resources
Microsoft’s Performance pages for Business Central – Collection of resources from Microsoft that covers many performance topics.
The Essence of ERP Solution Design and How to Get There – Blog by ArcherPoint’s Matt Traxinger focused on writing software with design and performance in mind.
Using Partial Records – Partial records allow for loading a subset of normal table fields when accessing a SQL-based data source. Using partial records improves the performance of objects like reports and OData pages – objects whose source code loops through records. It’s particularly beneficial when table extensions are used in the application.
Partial Record KQL sample query – Example of using Partial Records from Waldo on GitHub.
Performance and Data Management Tools Recap – Roberto Stefanetti provides a list of performance and data tools that are included in Business Central and how to use them.
7 Tips For Performance In Business Central – Business Central Geek Alberto Soben offers coding tips to improve Business Central performance.
Dynamics 365 Business Central and SQL Server 2022 – Stefano Demiliani explains the advantages of using SQL Server 2022 with Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1.
Telemetry
Using Telemetry – Microsoft’s documentation on monitoring and analyzing telemetry data
More on Telemetry – Read the blog from ArcherPoint’s Sara Keck, “Telemetry and Azure Application Insights for Business Central Online (SaaS) Helps You Resolve Issues Faster”
Telemetry: No-code alerting with Power BI Metrics
Telemetry: Report a performance issue
Creating Custom Telemetry Traces for Applications Insights Monitoring
Interested in Dynamics NAV and Business Central development? Be sure to see our collection of NAV/BC Development Blogs.
Read “How To” blogs from ArcherPoint for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.