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Small and medium business | Business Central, N...
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Seeking Best Way to Manage Reusable Extensions with Dependent Add-ons in Business Central

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Posted on by 2,100

Hello,

We have developed a common licensing extension that serves as a shared component for our company's Business Central add-ons. The objective is to centralize licensing functionality and ensure seamless integration across all our extensions.

Currently, this setup requires the common extension to be installed alongside any dependent extension. For example, if a user installs one of our add-ons from AppSource, they must also install the common licensing extension separately.

To address this, we considered merging the licensing functionality directly into each add-on. However, this approach presents challenges:

  • Any updates to the common extension would require updating all dependent add-ons, making it difficult to manage both trial and subscribed users.
  • Managing and deploying updates across multiple extensions would become increasingly complex.

We are exploring whether it is possible to structure this common extension as a reusable package or library that can be seamlessly integrated without requiring a separate installation.

Has anyone implemented a similar approach in Business Central? What would be the best practice for managing shared dependencies efficiently within a suite of related extensions?

We would appreciate any insights, recommendations, or best practices from the community.

Thank you in advance!

I have the same question (0)
  • Verified answer
    Holly Huffman Profile Picture
    6,538 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at
    Library Apps: You can create a library app that contains the common licensing functionality. This library app can be listed as a dependency in the app.json file of each add-on. When a user installs an add-on from AppSource, the library app will be automatically installed if it's not already present
  • Suggested answer
    Teddy Herryanto (That NAV Guy) Profile Picture
    14,284 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at
    this is a common scenario with common library or licensing app. what you need to do when developing the common app is to make sure not to introduce breaking changes too often. the dependent apps can still use older version of common app for a while until they need to use the newer version.
     
    doing it in AppSource is easy because the common app will be installed together with the dependent apps.
  • Verified answer
    Gerardo Rentería García Profile Picture
    25,236 Most Valuable Professional on at

    Hi, good day
    I hope this can help you, and give you some hints.

    Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central “Offering Apps”

    Best Regards
    Gerardo

  • Suggested answer
    YUN ZHU Profile Picture
    95,729 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at
    This is a standard feature. You can try installing Jet Report, which will automatically install the dependent extensions.
    Please use the methods mentioned by other experts.
     
    Thanks.
    ZHU

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