Option to Enum Conversion Tool

Jalmaraz

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Introduction

In the previous post AL Enums late discovering (dynamics.com) I talked about Enums advantages over options, but I have stronger motivations to do something else about options to Enums conversion:

- Problems panel is warning lots of future errors and misbehaving in option to Enum assignation.

- In BC world all of us have a past, a heavy C/SIDE past, and I have converted projects from old C/SIDE code with over one hundred option fields. In fact, the work of convert this huge quantity of good C/AL code forced me to begin making my own VSCode extensions. I don´t want to make again apps that worked fine in C/SIDE, and I worked these years easing conversion minimizing manual operations.

Due these needs, in my renaming extension JAL Variable Naming - Visual Studio Marketplace I made an Options to Enums conversion tool. In sections bellow I will explain tool use comparing with manual conversion.

First: old way

The starting point is an old option field:
field(69014; "TIP Test Choice"; Option)
{
OptionMembers = Never,All;
OptionCaption = 'Never,All';
DataClassification = CustomerContent;
}
If we want to convert this into an Enum old way we have to do:
Make the .al Enum file:
enum 69000 "TIP Test Choice"
{
Extensible = true;
value(0; Never)
{
Caption = 'Never';
}
value(1; All)
{
Caption = 'All';
}
}

Substitute in field option by enum type:
field(69014; "TIP Test Choice"; enum "TIP Test Choice")
{
DataClassification = CustomerContent;
}

With extension utility

Create initial csv file. Invoke command "JAL Option to enum. Create initial CSV":

Open in Excel the file created in step above and edit new Enum ids and names (can be duplicate, if applies to re-use):

When the excel is filled invoke "JAL Option to enum. Create new enums and substitute options" and select the edited csv file:

And this step will create the new .al Enum files in src/enum folder and automatically will substitute the options by Enums in tables and table extensions: