Dynamics Business Central / NAV Developer Digest - Vol. 466
ArcherPoint’s Developer Digest focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV development. This week’s volume includes new AI features in Business Central, using JSON in BC, applying underscores in variable names, and FlowFields in Microsoft Fabric.
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.
New AI features in Business Central
The latest Business Central release (23.2) includes the new Copilot Developer Toolkit. The toolkit helps developers follow responsible AI principles, accelerate time to market, and create generative AI capabilities in Business Central.
Stefano Demiliani discusses refining prompt text to improve the AI results in Copilot. Read his blog, Dynamics 365 Business Central: Microsoft standard AI features and prompts.
JSON for Business Central
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is composed of two basic elements: name/value pairs and arrays and object structures. JSON is used to exchange data and is the preferred format for exchanging with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Alberto, the Business Central Geek, provides an informative tutorial on using JSON in Business Central, including:
- A discussion of JSON data types
- How to create and read JSON objects
- And how to manage JSON codeunits
Read his blog, JSON Full Guide In Business Central.
Using underscores in variable names
We had a lively discussion about using underscores in variable names in AL code.
Chris K. shared, “We had an issue yesterday where I had a dependency with an _ in the name, and the updated pipelines failed. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what it was. I had to change the Name in Settings.json and rename the app file to remove the extra _. It’s not only at the beginning… ‘appname_C46’ would cause issues with the pipeline.”
Pranav J. added, “If the app name starts with _, then it does not appear on the extension management page. They are a hidden app (i.e., an API app from Microsoft). You will have to find them through PowerShell.”
FlowFields in Microsoft Fabric
FlowFields are calculated fields in Business Central. Since they exist only at runtime and are not physically stored in the database, they help increase Business Central’s performance.
Bert Verbeek offers two ways to simulate flowfields inside Microsoft Fabric using bc2adls tooling using Power Query and Data Wrangler.
Learn more by reading his blog, How to: Business Central Flowfields inside Microsoft Fabric.
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.