I often wonder how I find myself in situations like this. On my day off I find myself behind my desk doing something which is not my responsibility, nor am I getting paid to do it.
If you say A, you also have to be willing to say B and C. This is what my parents told me when I was young so when I promissed Bugsy and Jesper to look into making the Business Central Base Application smaller I decided I may as well make it into a decent project.
Social media is fantastic and it can be used in many different ways. Where most people are mostly consumers others use it to ask questions. Some share knowledge and experience and gain loyal followers. This is pure awesomeness and mostly rewarded with the Microsoft MVP award for those who don’t give up.
Very few succeed in using social media to drive change. Those who do are known by many such as Elon Musk and Greta Thunberg.
So to continue where we left off yesterday when I did a pull request on the Business Central System App project on GitHub.
After my pull request someone at Microsoft did a code review in order to make sure quality standards are respected. Here are the details:
I have to admit something. First of all, this is not actually my code. It came from my colleague Michael Nielsen. Secondly this blog post is a bit orchestrated since Jesper and I discussed in Antwerp at NAVTechDays how to promote people contributing.
Working with Microsoft is pretty tough since your doing code for millions of users, not just one customer. Business Central should be easy to use and if you call the culture info with for example 0 or 80,943 you’ll get an error explaining that the language does not exist but not in an easy to read way.
I’m tempted to follow the idea to wrap the call in a TryFunction, but that means introducing a readeable error message, which includes translation and I am worried that will delay my pull request.
An alternative is to wrap it into a try function and return the orriginal integer if the call fails.
What do you think? It proves to me that coding for millions is a lot harder than it looks.
With the recent Wave II release of Business Central we also got the first wave of Open Source in our beloved NAV/BC product.
This means that rather than making customization for one specific customer or ISV you can now have this pushed back into the product and stay there forever.
Today I did my first Pull Request and I wanted to share how I did that.
With reports, especially documents that go out, translations are key. In the next release of our ForNAV extension we wanted to add a new feature where you can translate invoices by simply adding captions to a table or import them from an Excel sheet or Azure Blob Container file.
With translations there are rules that allow you to inherrit languages from related languages if they are related. For example Flamish (NLB) can be inherrited from Dutch (NLD).
Especially in Europe this drastically reduces the number of translations and you only have to manage exceptions where terminology is different. (Trust me, this is the case with Flamish and Dutch).
I actually only need one line of DotNET code
CultureInfo.CultureInfo(LanguageId).Parent.LCID
Normally you are not allowed to do DotNET, but System App has target set to OnPrem so simple usages of DotNET are actually allowed. (I hope).
The first step is to log into GitHub and Fork the Microsoft ALAppExtensions project and clone this to your Visual Studio Code
Then you do the change. Remember Microsoft has this two-layer model where your real code is in the implementation.
The final step, or at least where I am now, is to do a pull request and sign the license.
After this you need a code review and this is what I am waiting for right now.
Today I was a bit puzzled by getting this error message and how to fix it.
error AS0054: The AppSourceCop configuration must specify one of the following properties: 'mandatorySuffix', 'mandatoryPrefix', or 'mandatoryAffixes'
Yes, you can google the message but that only brings you to pages that describe the message, not how to fix it.
It appears to be easy so I wanted to spare others the time.
This is a blog that I wanted to write for quite a while, but it’s only until last week or so that I think I’ve found what I like to call, a “best practice” or if you will, a “Design Pattern”.
What is this all about? With the move from C/AL to Visual Studio Code we also moved to file based instead of stored in database.
This means we also have to give these files a name and we have the option to organise the files into folders, or subdirectories if you are a born-in-dos generation.
If you follow the Microsoft guidelines and/or use the tooling from Waldo your extension your extension will probably look something like this:
Although this works perfectly there are a few issues with this that I don’t like. I’ll try to explain myself.
The Object ID is still there. Not perse a big problem but in the cloud they don’t mean anything anymore except making the object Unique. In the past, we as developers tried to use object ID’s in a smart way, like make sure that table & page have the same ID, or make sure that Header and Line tables have adjacent ID’s so Object Designer in C/Side would show them nicely grouped.
In most projects as well as in Microsoft’s BaseApp this is no longer true and possible. We have too much legacy to trust sorting and grouping objects by ID.
If you prefixed your objects in C/Side and run the conversion your filenames look something like this.
To me this looks like a horrible waste of the first 15 or so characters of your filename. I tried it for a while and it’s very hard to work with.
For reasons of legacy object names in AL can only have 30 characters. On top of this you’ll loose 3 or 4 on the TLA you need to mandatory put in my Microsoft. This often leads to horrible object names which are then converted to your file name
If all of your projects have the same object tree it does not make it very clear what kind of extension you are looking at. By opening the project we can only recognise it as an AL project but we cannot see what it does.
I can hear you say, so what? What do you suggest we do Mark?
When I opened the BaseApp in AL I got the first Aha moment on how to solve this puzzle. To my surprise Microsoft was not following their own guidelines.
It would not be the first time they don’t follow their own guidelines and at first it pissed my off a bit. But only untiil the beauty of this naming pattern struck me just like that.
With these naming guidelines you can automagically see what belongs together regardless of the Object ID and Object Type
For those of you who remember the old Solution Developer materials will also know that there are strickt naming guidelines. Like the Table Name is singular, the Page Name is Plural. If you have a List and a Card you name them like that etc, etc, etc.
If you were religious about these rules and follow this pattern your project suddenly makes much more sense to look at.
So I hear you say, what about subfolders? The BaseApp has over 6000 files and this naming does not make it easy to work with if everything is in one root folder.
The logical answer here is to apply common sense. Group your objects together if they belong together.
This also gives your project a clear intent. I can see by looking at the folder structure that this is a report pack with Labels, Sales Taks reports, Financial reports, and so on, and so on.
If you remove the abbreviations and then look at for example a Journal the pure beauty of this way of working with files becomes as clear as sunshine on a cloudy day.
See how nice the Batch, template and register are grouped together and it’s very easy to find the file you need.
One can debate if in this specific case the word “Example” is overkill, but if you think for a moment it would say “Item” I’m sure to think you agree with me.
To me this is another indication of how smart one of the old Navision rules were and it looks to me that Navision was born in the cloud back in the late 1980ies. They just had not invented the cloud yet.
Use your brain, think out of the box and be surprised.
Marije Brummel Blog | Business Central, Azure and more...