Dynamics Business Central / NAV Developer Digest - Vol. 541

ArcherPoint’s Developer Digest focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV development. This week’s volume includes debugging agent AL code, AI chat and telemetry, configuring a data retention policy in Business Central, and using Try functions with database operations.

The Dynamics 365 Business Central community, consisting of developers, project managers, and consultants, collaborates across various platforms to share valuable insights. At ArcherPoint, we greatly value their dedication and expertise. To ensure widespread access to this technical knowledge, we created Developer Digest.

Debugging agent AL code

With the AL language extension runtime 17.0 for 2026 release wave 1, Microsoft has added a new client type, Agent. This client type will allow developers to debug the AL code being executed by agent sessions.

The Agent client type can attach to an agent session on a cloud sandbox or on an on-premises server.

Find out more by reading Stefano Demiliani’s blog, Dynamics 365 Business Central: debugging agent sessions.

Chatting up your telemetry

Waldo had an interesting exchange with ChatGPT. The question he asked was if it was possible to simply ask questions on Business Central telemetry and actually get something meaningful back.

The short answer is: YES!

In fact, it is possible to analyze performance, examine stack traces, and view SQL statements. You can even ask it to export reports and charts as PDFs or PNGs.

Have a closer look by reading his blog, Analyzing BC Telemetry with AI with the “BC Telemetry Buddy”.

Configuring a data retention policy in Business Central

The amount of data you retain affects the performance of your system, whether you are in the cloud or on-premises. Data retention policies let you remove unnecessary files, such as log files, automatically when they are no longer needed.

You can set your data retention policy to delete data after a certain amount of time has elapsed, such as one month, one week, one year, etc. You can also define when the system begins counting the time a record is being stored or set up special filters that let you establish how you want to delete records.

Saurav Dhyani demonstrates how in his video, Data Retention in Microsoft Dynamics 365: Everything You Need to Know.

Try functions and database operations

Try methods in AL are useful for handling errors during code execution. For example, they allow developers to display more user-friendly messages than system-generated error messages.

However, what happens when database operations are performed within a Try function?

Erik Hougaard tackles this question and more in his video, Database operations inside a TryFunction, good or bad?

Are you interested in Dynamics NAV and Business Central development? Check out our collection of NAV/BC Development Blogs.

Read “How To” blogs from ArcherPoint by Cherry Bekaert for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.

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