Dynamics NAV / Business Central Developer Digest - Vol 385
ArcherPoint’s Developer Digest focuses on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central development and Dynamics NAV development. In Developer Digest Volume 385, we share BC performance tips and environment triggers, how to work with multiple AL Extensions in VS, AL-Go for GitHub, and more.
The Dynamics NAV and Business Central community, including the ArcherPoint technical staff, is made up of developers, project managers, and consultants who are constantly communicating, with the common goal of sharing helpful information with one another to help customers be more successful.
As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them on blogs, forums, social media…so everyone can benefit. We in Marketing watch these interactions and never cease to be amazed by the creativity, dedication, and brainpower we’re so fortunate to have in this community—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share this great information with everyone who might not have the time to check out the multitude of resources out there?
So, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV/BC Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from NAV/BC experts and devotees around the world. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.
Performance Tips for Business Central
The Business Central Geek shares 7 tips to improve performance in D365 BC. You might be familiar with them, as some tips have been around since the C/AL days. You’ll find information on Findset vs Findfirst, Partial Records, SetAutoCalcFields, CalcSums, and more.
Working with Multiple AL Extensions with Dependencies in a Visual Studio Code Workspace
Stefano Demiliani walks you through the new AL language extension (available in BC 20) feature that allows you to publish projects with dependencies and publish the full dependency tree for the active project. This is going to save developers a lot of time.
Business Central SaaS: Environment Triggers
Waldo (send him congrats on 15 years of sharing his findings via his blog!) attempts to document the under-documented Environment Triggers in BC SaaS, citing the scenario of copying Live environments into Test environments—assuming Microsoft only wants us to use two “real” events, OnClearCompanyConfig and OnClearDatabaseConfig. Koppelaar confirms Waldo’s assumptions, noting:
- Every configuration function must be implemented as a codeunit and an extended enum value
- Codeunit implements a specific interface, which is linked to this enum
- In production, there’s a page in which you can see and enable the configuration functions and add parameters to it
- As a result, we can clone environments to sandbox and configure them right away (mainly integration points)
AL-Go for GitHub
Freddy’s been busy creating AL-Go for GitHub, a plug-and-play DevOps for Business Central PTEs or AppSource apps on GitHub. This tool does NOT require you to modify PowerShell scripts or change .yaml workflows or pipelines, but still allows you to set up and maintain full DevOps for your Business Central projects with a click of a button. AL-Go for GitHub will only be supported on GitHub, and there are no plans of migrating it to Azure DevOps. Also, they will not ship any new versions of the Hands-On-Lab with a focus on Azure DevOps.
Cleaning Up Setup Data When Copying Business Central to a Sandbox Environment
Divyesh Chitte provides advice for cleaning up your setup data using Codeunit 1884. Read the full article in Dynamics 365 Business Central: How to clean up your Setup data when copying to a sandbox environment (Sandbox Clean up).
Interested in Dynamics NAV and/or 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.