Develop your first extension in Business Central

Business central is a popular ERP system developed by Microsoft for small and medium businesses. Although it is very rich, still sometimes businesses need to extend some features using custom extensions.

Today we are going to learn how to set up your first extension in Business Central. And following things we are going to look today -

1. Setup development environment.
2. Installation of “Al Language”.
3. Publish and Uninstall Package. 

Step 1: Visual Studio Code is required to develop extensions for Business Central. If you have already installed Visual Studio Code, that’s great. Otherwise search on google “Visual Studio Code” and install it. 

Open Visual Studio Code, you might know Business Central extension language is “AL language”. So we need to install “AL Language” in Visual Studio Code before development. 

Step 2: Install “AL Language” - 

Open Visual Studio and search “AL Language” extension and install it. 

Follow the steps given above. 

Step 3: To open Command Palette.. Press Ctrl + Shift + P or you can directly open using menu bar “View > Command Palette”. 

And then select “Al: GO !” 

It selects a default path something like this in textbox. 

“C:\Users\User\Documents\AL\ALProject2”

You can change path as you want and then click ok. 

After  it asks for the targeted version of Business Central against which you want to use this extension. Select targeted version and then you can see a default project loaded in Visual Studio Code. 

Step 4: On the start of the project or if you use command “Run >> Start debugging”,  it asks for authentication. At the right side of the window you can see a code, copy and then paste in the authentication window of browser.

Copy code and add as per given image. 

After clicking next. you will see this message in Visual Studio Code. 

Step 5: Change message in HelloWorld.ai and run application. It will be published again with modified version. 

Step 6: Find your extension in Business Central - 

In the top bar click on the search icon and search for “Extension Management” as per given this image. 

All extensions are listed there on extension management page. 

Step 7: Delete Extension - Click on … of the extension box and you will get options to select. Select uninstall from list. 

Summary -

We learned about how to create first extension in business central using simple steps. 

1. Installation of editor “Visual Studio Code”.
2. Installation of “Al Language”.
3. Authentication using Cloud based Business Central. 
4. Modify code and publish packages. 
5. Delete installed package. 

I hope this article will give a clear picture of how you can create first extension in Business Central and manage it. 

Thanks for reading and happy Learning.

Thanks,

Sandeep Mishra

https://dynamicspal.com/