Developer Preview – March Update

We’re pleased to announce the March update of the Developer Preview. We have been working hard on improving the capabilities of the toolset as well as fixing incoming issues reported by you. Below you can see the changes that we’re announcing for this update. The preview is already available if you sign up for the Ready to Go program. Read more at http://aka.ms/readytogo.

After April 2nd the build will become public and you can get it through http://aka.ms/bcsandbox.

Please note, that the improvements announced in this blog post are not available in Dynamics NAV 2018 and the following cumulative updates of Dynamics NAV 2018.

 

Static Code Analysis

Specifying “al.enableCodeAnalysis”: true in your settings will enable static code analysis for AL projects.  Three analyzers have been implemented that will support general AL coding guidelines, AppSource, and per-tenant extension analysis. Analyzers can be individually enabled by specifiying them in the al.codeAnalyzers setting.

“al.enableCodeAnalysis”: true,

“al.codeAnalyzers”: [

“${CodeCop}”

]

You can customize how the diagnostics generated by the analyzers are reported by adding a custom ruleset file <myruleset>.ruleset.json to the project and specifying the path to it in the “al.ruleSetPath” setting.

“al.ruleSetPath” : “myruleset.ruleset.json”

Using the snippets truleset and trule will get you started quickly.

For more information, see Using the Code Analysis Tool.

Help for new pages

When creating new Pages, Reports, and XMLPorts in Extensions V2, it is now possible to specify the help link that will be used when the user presses the Help button in the user interface.

You can do this by using the property HelpLink on Pages, for example:

page 50100 MyPageWithHelp
{
HelpLink = ‘https://www.github.com/Microsoft/AL’;
}

And by using the property HelpLink on the request page of Reports and XmlPorts:

report 50100 MyReportWithHelp
{
requestpage
{
HelpLink = ‘https://www.github.com/Microsoft/AL’;
}
}

For more information, see Adding Help Links.

Creating Role Center Headlines

You can set up a Role Center to display a series of headlines, where headlines appear one at a time for a predefined period of time before moving to the next. The headlines can provide users with up-to-date information and insights into the business and their daily work.
For more information, see Creating Role Center Headlines.

 

Improved experience for event subscribers

We improved the snippets and IntelliSense around event subscribers, for both the attribute arguments and the method parameters. This is now working for trigger events, integration and business events. In case of business and integration events, the suggestion of the method parameters is made based on the attributes of the event publisher in order to know if the global variables and/or the sender should also be suggested.

Here is what it looks like to subscribe to an integration event when using the snippets:

Here is what it looks when writing the event subscriber from scratch:

 

Working with data?

You can now inspect the contents of a table when you publish an AL project (F5 and Crtl+F5) from Visual Code. Simply modify the launch.json file of the project to include the “startupObjectType=”table” and “startupObjectId”=” settings, replacing with the ID of the table that you want to see. The table will display in client as read-only.

From the client, you can also view a specific table by appending the URL with “&table=”, such as:
https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/?company=CRONUS%20Inc.&table=18

For more information, see Viewing Table Data.

 

Choose your cue layout on Role Centers

We now offer a wide layout option for cues. The wide layout is designed to display large values and gives you a way emphasize a group of cues. When set to the wide layout, a cue group will be placed in its own area, spanning the entire width of the workspace.

For more information, see Cues and Action Tiles.

 

As usual we encourage you to let us know how you like working with these additions and keep submitting suggestions and bugs. You can see all the filed bugs on our GitHub issues list (https://github.com/Microsoft/AL/issues).

 

For a list of our previous blog posts, see the links at the end of this post.

NAV Development Tools Preview – February 2018 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – Anniversary Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – December 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – November 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – October 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – September 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – August 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – July 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – June 2017  Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – April 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – March 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – February 2017 Update

NAV Development Tools Preview – January 2017 Update

Announcing the Preview of Modern Development Tools for Dynamics NAV