Dynamics 365 Business Central – AL: Publish full dependency tree for active project

Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 introduced a feature for working with workspaces and dependencies. Developers using runtime version 9.0 or higher can use the exciting feature Publish full dependency tree for active project.

The AL: Publish full dependency tree for active project command will traverse a project dependency graph in the workspace and install any required projects if these aren’t already deployed. The command will calculate the correct order in which to compile and publish the dependencies of the current project and publish them using the launch.json option selected from the currently active project.

Only project and application references within the scope of the workspace will be traversed. In cases where the deployed AL project has dependencies on applications not within the current workspace, they must be installed and deployed beforehand.

How does this work? For example, I have a workspace containing four apps – App1, App2, App3, and App4. For those apps, App2 and App3 depend on App1, and App4 depends on App3. Previously, the apps had to be manually deployed in a hierarchical order to ensure the dependency was installed before the app that references it.

The full dependency tree is automatically discovered and published:

Note: The code and information discussed in this article is for informational and demonstration purposes only. This content was created referencing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 online.