Renumbering tool for AL Business Central: breaking down VSCode API basics.

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Jalmaraz

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I need a version for AL of old renumbering tool. Old NAV programmers know this tool for sure. Now I am publishing in AppSource, converting from C/SIDE to AL over and over, and I needed to save the renumbering sequences and apply them automatically.

For this purpose, I created a tool (is not in Market place, you can download the .vsix and install it manually in Visual Studio Code) to renumber AL objects.

Is not a great deal, and I think is not worth to publish it in Market-place. People who made the renumbering for C/SIDE had a lot of work. Number in C/SIDE was everywhere in each reference to the object and the old renumbering go back and forth searching for all the references in the txt files. My work has been lighter, I only have to change the number In the first line of the Al object file. So, Why did I make this extension? I made it because in AppSource transformation I have to renumber a lot of objects, save this renumbering and apply it several times. This saved me a lot of work.

VSCODE API breakdown

But, for me was more important to use this easy extension as lab to show how to do an VSCode extension and how to manage the visual studio code API. In my opinion, one of the biggest problems of VSCode extensions develop, is the difficult of compile a lot of information about VSCode API. Yes, community wrote a lot about that but sometimes the examples are not very useful and we have a serious lack of guidelines.

In this extension I used:

File management with VS Code API | Visual Studio Code Extension API
Document editing with VS Code API | Visual Studio Code Extension API
Open dialogs with VS Code API | Visual Studio Code Extension API

In further posts I will breakdown the extension source code and will explain how to use this basic objects. If you want to go forward you have all the source code available in:

JalmarazMartn/ALRenumbering (github.com)