ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV / Business Central Developer Digest - vol 275

The NAV 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 Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from NAV experts and devotees around the world. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.

Making the Business Central Base Application Smaller

In Part One of his Breaking a Monolith blog, Mark Brummel talks about a project he’s working on to make the Business Central base application smaller. Right now, they are looking at moving certain application areas out of the base: Fixed Assets, Cost Accounting, Service Management, and Jobs. Here are his  reasons why this is important:

1. Increase speed of pre-compiler and C# conversion processes
2. Easier for newbies to understand
3. Allows partners to replace these ‘modules’ with other functionality

Give it a read for the full details.

VS Code Shortcuts to Remember

",serif">",sans-serif">Bill Warnke offers: “My two most used keyboard ",sans-serif">shortcuts",sans-serif"> in VS Code: 

1. ",serif">",sans-serif">Ctrl+D",sans-serif"> to "more" select highlighted text, and
2. ",serif">",sans-serif">Alt + arrow up/down to move a line

",serif">",sans-serif">Alt up/down is useful moving variables around to satisfy the variable declaration by type requirements.” 

Developer Tip of the Day: Obsolete 

Kyle shares: “In AL, lots of objects, procedures, and fields can be marked as obsolete using the properties ObsoleteState and ObsoleteReason. It's a good way to ‘retire’ unused objects and fields without actually removing them, which in the case of tables, is a destructive act and requires special development to preserve data in that table.

See the Obsolete Attribute and ObsoleteState Property documentation for more information.

Bill W adds: “As of right now, in a production SaaS environment, there is no way to remove a field. You mark things as obsolete and move your data or forget about it.”

Developer Tip of the Day: Procedure Overloads

",serif">",sans-serif">Kyle says: “",sans-serif">Take a look",sans-serif"> at the example below. This lets you call the Open procedure with anywhere from one to four parameters.",sans-serif">”

",serif">",sans-serif">procedure ",sans-serif">Open(",sans-serif">PassedLabel1: Text)  

",serif">",sans-serif"> begin  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">1 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel1; 

",serif">",sans-serif"> end;  

",serif">",sans-serif"> procedure ",sans-serif">Open(",sans-serif">PassedLabel1: Text; PassedLabel2: Text)  

",serif">",sans-serif"> begin  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">1 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel1;  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">2 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel2;  

",serif">",sans-serif"> end;  

",serif">",sans-serif"> procedure ",sans-serif">Open(",sans-serif">PassedLabel1: Text; PassedLabel2: Text; PassedLabel3: Text)  

",serif">",sans-serif"> begin  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">1 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel1;  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">2 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel2;  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">3 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel3; 

",serif">",sans-serif"> end;  

",serif">",sans-serif"> procedure ",sans-serif">Open(",sans-serif">PassedLabel1: Text; PassedLabel2: Text; PassedLabel3: Text; PassedLabel4: Text)  

",serif">",sans-serif"> begin  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">1 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel1;  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">2 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel2;  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">3 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel3;  

",serif">",sans-serif">Label",sans-serif">4 :",sans-serif">= PassedLabel4;  

",serif">",sans-serif"> end;  

",serif"> 

If you are interested in Dynamics NAV and Business Central development, be sure to see our collection of NAV/BC Development Blogs.

Read the "How To" blogs from ArcherPoint for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.