Van Vugt's dynamiXs

Frost has hit the night. Sitting in our Finnish fireplace heated kitchen, looking at our garden wall, Wheather Report humming in the back, and having done my preps last week, I am ready to start writing another post on test automation. Being a protagonist of using standard tests and their associated libraries many have asked me: "Luc, what is the best way to find and use useful test helper functions?" So, that will be today's topic: how to find and use standard test helper functions . As the saying…

In my post How-to: Create Notifications – Steps to Take I introduced a step-by-step recipe that can help you to efficiently create a (non-intrusive) notification. I gladly used the YouTube video Develop SAAS user experiences for Dynamics 365 Business Central by Daniel Rimmelzwaan to illustrate this. Doing this I stuck to his example without adding anything, but the step-by-step approach. In this post I would like to extend the example allowing you to add your notification to My Notifications and…

In a recent VSCode/AL update training the topic notifications , as part of SaaSifying your solution , was tackled. After a short introduction of what these notifications (functionally) are about I explained and demoed how to develop them. Inviting the attendees thereafter to pose their questions, one of them, a seasoned C/SIDE developer whom I will call Bogdan, marked that he had been implementing them a couple of times and still had issues with the different parts that have to be developed. He…

As more people are starting to get into test automation, my book is being used more and more. And as time is moving on it gets outdated more and more, unfortunately. Because of this I have asked my publisher almost a year ago to update the content to be fully in sync with the current state of the product. To no avail (so far). As part of an internal project at one of the Dutch Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC partners I will be training their developers on this topic and for that have provided them…

You might know that I have been (and still am) a fan of Statical Prism . But now that we moved into the AL world this is becoming obsolete as it only handles C/AL code. Christin Clausen and his stati-cal team have been working hard on the AL version of the tool. Last week they released a preview version of Prism for AL to the community and they asked me to review it. Unfortunately I did not find enough time yet to that, but had a quick look and thought it very promising. And as such worthwhile…

CODE COMPLETE! Yesss. This was waiting somewhat too long on my desk to be completed, but this morning I finally did: Extended Text on Assembly Documents . This example extends the standard Extended Text feature in Business Central to assembly documents. As with the previous two completed examples ( Blocking Deletion of Warehouse Shipment Lines and Automatically Set Posting Period on GL Setup and User ) you will find a full collection of ATDD scenarios in Excel and PowerShell files, that were…

A couple of months ago I introduced here my GitHub project Test Automation Examples when I had just finished the first example as a spinoff of my new online course. And around that time I started with example 2 . Test wise this one was a bit too ambitious and as a consequence it is still waiting to be completed. Hopefully somewhere during my long summer recess I get it done. Meanwhile, at my major employer, I designed a nice new feature with a bit more restricted scope than example 2 which this…

Sunday morning, sun softly touching me while I am sitting behind my laptop at the other end of our kitchen table. Time to write the post that has been on my mind for quite a while. A topic partly born out of amazement. An amazement triggered every once in a while when hearing fellow professionals saying that it does not make sense to run the standard tests [1] on your solution. Our daily practice shows different for already more than three years. That's what I would like to share with you below…

Over almost a decade I have been evangelizing test automation by blogging , presenting at various conferences and webinars, workshops, and, eventually last year, writing a book . People are picking up, but it's clear there is still "a war to be won". Testing, more specifically test automation, is too often considered a cost center instead of an essential part of our daily development practice. In my joined article with Global Mediator, called From a testing mindset to a Quality Assurance-based…

When working on getting the standard tests running on our solution the standard Test Tool was not making our live as easy as it could. Wanting to rerun only successful or failing tests, this was near to impossible. Manually deselecting individual tests turning of the Run field, was, euphemistically said, not the most meaningful thing to do. So, already a couple of years ago we decided to add some actions to the test tool allowing us to (1) select the Run field for (a) all tests (b) only failing…

Overtime I have been advocating the use of the standard Business Central tests in various posts, webinars, conference presentations, and my book . IMHO this has been, and still, is an undervalued collection of over 22,000 automated tests that cover all functional areas. It's a no brainer to let them run on your solution as we did on ours . In case your solution intertwines with standard code chances are big that these tests will also hit your code resulting in a number of failing tests. As discussed…

Those of us that have been around long enough will remember that Microsoft Business Solutions-Navision 4.0 came out with the new XMLport and MenuSuite object types. I can clearly remember a sort of astonishment about this UI-less XMLport. To allow you to feed this "pipeline" with data you had to wrap it in another object. Where Dataports had Request Forms like reports the XMLport totally failed this. And if you wanted the user to provide input, you would typically wrap the call to the XMLport…