Gunnar's Blog

Yesterday I got a question via LinkedIn . I need to add Spanish translation to my W1 instance. How do I do that? So, let me walk you through that process. Here is my Business Central setup. It is the Icelandic Docker Container, so I have Icelandic and English. Switching between Icelandic and English works just fine. Switching to Spanish gives me a mix of Spanish and English. The Spanish translation for the platform is shipped with the DVD image and automatically installed. So are a lot of other languages. Icelandic and English are built in captions in the…

In Advania we are switching more and more to using the Docker images for Dynamics NAV and Business Central development. Since version 1809 of Windows 10 and the latest blog post from Arend-Jan Kauffmann we are moving to using the Docker EE engine instead of the Docker Desktop setup. Using the latest Windows 10 version and the latest version of Docker means that we can now use “Process Isolation” images when running NAV and Business Central. Not using process isolation images on Windows 10 requires Hyper-V support. Inside Hyper-V a server core is running as the platform for the processes…

I was looking into a customer App yesterday. That app had a dependency defined in app.json. I wanted to look at the real requirements for this dependency. I found 1 (one) place in my code where this dependent App was used. dataitem(PageLoop; "Integer") { DataItemTableView = SORTING (Number) WHERE (Number = CONST (1)); column(Phone_No_Cust; Cust."Phone No.") { } column(Registration_No_Cust; Cust."ADV Registration No.") { } column(CompanyInfo_Picture; CompanyInfo.Picture) { } In Iceland we add a field to the Customer table (Cust.”ADV Registration No.”). Every business…

It is good practice to have some audit log of what uses do in the application. Some versions ago Microsoft introduced the Change Log to log data changes. How about logging an action execution? One of the built in solutions in Business Central can be used to solve this. We now have the Activity Log (Table 710). To use the Activity Log we need to have a record to attach the activity log to. All our Apps have a Setup table that usually only have one record. I like to attach my Activity Log to that record. To show the Activity Log from that record you can add this action to that record…

When we design and write our code we need to think about performance. We have been used to thinking about database performance, using FindFirst(), FindSet(), IsEmpty() where appropriate. We also need to think about performance when we create our subscriber Codeunits. Let’s consider this Codeunit. codeunit 50100 MySubscriberCodeunit { trigger OnRun() begin end; [EventSubscriber(ObjectType::Codeunit, Codeunit::"Sales-Post", 'OnBeforePostSalesDoc', '', true, true)] local procedure MyProcedure(var SalesHeader: Record "Sales Header") begin Message('I am pleased that…

Dynamics 365 Business Central & NAV March 13-14, 2019 On March 11th and 12th I will be teaching a VSCode and Modern NAV Development. This course will be held from 8:00am-5:00pm each day The goal of the workshop is to learn about the new development tool for Business Central (Dynamics NAV), VSCode, GIT source control management and to experience what AL programming is about • What makes AL different from C/AL • How do you build and deploy a new BC feature • How can I convert my current code into AL • How to get ready for publishing your IP to AppSource • How to use GIT for you code …

We have several ways of using the JSON interfaces. I will give few examples with the required C/AL code. I will be using Advania’s Online Banking solution interfaces for examples. The Advania’s Online Banking solution is split into several different modules. The main module has the general framework. Then we have communication modules and functionality modules. On/Off Question A communication module should not work if the general framework does not exist or is not enabled for the current company. Hence, I need to ask the On/Off question This is triggered by calling the…

There are two objects we use in all JSON interfaces. We use the TempBlob table and our custom JSON Interface Codeunit. Abstract JSON interface uses the same concept as a web service. The endpoint is defined by the Codeunit Name and the caller always supplies a form of request data ( JSON ) and expects a response data ( JSON ). These interface calls therefore are only internal to the Business Central (NAV) server and are very fast. All the data is handled in memory only. We define these interfaces by Endpoints. Some Endpoints have Methods. We call these Endpoints with a JSON…

As we move from C/AL and all-in-one database we need to redesign how we make one application or a functionality available to the next. Microsoft recommends that we build multiple AL extensions, not putting all our code into a single extension. My goal is to be able to develop, test and execute an extension regardless of if other extensions are installed or not. Some functionality may depend on another extensions. Still I don’t want to add compile dependencies between these extensions. For just over a year we have been designing and implementing methods to solve this task. In the…

The goal of this post is to demo from start to finish the automated build and test of an AL solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Configure build steps The build steps using AdvaniaGIT are similar to the build step Soren describes here . The first two steps and the last one is automatically created.  We create PowerShell steps to be executed in between. To begin with I like to make sure that the previous build environment is removed.  If everything is configured and working correctly the environment is removed in the end of every build. Since I am working on daily builds…