Mastering BC 2.0

If you like enormous books that are chockfull of information on a wide variety of technical topics related to Business Central, you must drop everything that you are doing, RIGHT NOW, and let me tell you all about this book. I’ll even give you a link where you can order it.

Book Review Number Twelve

In early 2023 I got a message from Packt with a question whether I would like to help review another book. Over the years I have reviewed a bunch of books for Packt (this is number 12). It had been a while since the last one, so I was excited to put on my reviewer hat. This one was going to be a new and updated edition of a book called “Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central”. This is a very well-known reference book that is written by the dynamic Italian duo of Stefano Demiliani and Duilio Tacconi, both well known members of the BC community. Do yourself a favor and go follow their Twitter feeds (this one and this one), I’ll wait here.

The first edition came out in 2019, so it was about time that we got an updated version. For some reason I never got around to buying the first one, so I was fresh into this book without any preconceived notions about the content. Packt had sent me a table of content with a whopping 18 (yes, EIGHTEEN – and yes that is really spelled with just one ‘t’) chapters. VERY ambitious indeed…

It took most of 2023 to review these chapters. The sheer amount of content made it so that it regularly took entire weekends to process all the stuff and the code that was written. The last one was submitted in mid October, and the guys spent months processing all the feedback to finally release the book. They spared no effort to write the best book that they could, and it shows.

All the Things

You get 18 chapters on the most important technical topics in our BC world. I was going to write something specific about the content, but I’ll refer you to Stefano’s blog post to read more about that.

What I appreciate about this book is that each one of the chapters goes into enough meaningful detail that you feel you have a good grasp of the topic at hand. At the same time, you never get the feeling that you are taken too far into the matter. Wherever that is relevant, each chapter comes with a repository of sample code, to illustrate the topic. If you want you can write your own, and if you want to just follow along with the samples in the book, you can just open the code and poke at it.

Don’t let the sheer size of this book discourage you. Yes the book itself is MASSIVE, but the chapters individually are very manageable. There are other books that go into much more detail, but you will want to have this one to get yourself started on the topics. Another great feature is that you get access to all the book’s sample code in a GitHub repository.

My one ‘negative’ feedback was that in many instances the chapters contained the full object’s code. Sometimes you get pages of source code, which I personally think is a distraction. When I read a book like this, I have VSCode open with the sample code so I don’t need the full object in the book. I would have chosen to only include parts of the source code and highlight the important bits. When you only have the book in your hand that it can be useful to see the whole object though, so there’s an argument for whole objects anyway. Either way, you get lots of samples and that makes me very happy.

What if I already have the First Edition?

The thing is, I have not read the first edition, so I can’t speak for the content of that book. What I CAN tell you is that BC has evolved a TON since 2019, and all of the new capabilities get their due attention in this second edition. Things like Telemetry and AI were not yet available in those days, and even well-established topics have gotten a serious update, such as VSCode extensions and how DevOps can be done, and a ton of other stuff.

If you have the First Edition, it is time to retire it. This Second Edition deserves a spot on every technical BC person’s desk, or at least within reach.

Where can I Get it?

As per usual, two places where you can get it:

  • The Packt website – Packt’s online reader is really nice and searchable, I prefer it to Kindle, and there seems to be a discount on the eBook right now. Plus, being able to start reading right away is also nice, because Packt is not known for the best delivery times
  • Amazon – WAY better delivery times than Packt, so that’s where I would get it if I only wanted the paper version. The Kindle edition is more expensive than the eBook on Packt.

Mad respect and ALL the credit goes to Stefano and Duilio. In addition to having families and successful careers, they did a phenomenal job of writing this book for us. Writing this book was a monster of a task and they pulled it off. I am super proud to be a small part of making this the book that it is. Now click one of the two links and order the book!

Save Report Filters

Going back into the stone age, report objects have always remembered the filter values for the next time that you run the report. What I never noticed was a capability to actually save filter values (yes I now realize that it’s been in there for years now). It’s similar to saving a view of a list page, but for reports. It works a little hinky but let me try and explain.

What I Am Talking About

You may have noticed it in some (but not all) reports, processing-only or actual printed ones. Right at the top of the request page, you see a dropdown box with the words “Last used options and filters”. Click the dropdown arrow and that should show you an option to “Select from full list”.

This opens the “Select – Report Settings” page. The page actually has nothing to do with any settings, but it does show you a list of saved values for the options and filters of the report object. In my mind I am calling it a ‘view’.

I just created a bogus empty report just to show you the options, so ignore the content of the report itself. The interesting part of this page is what you can do. When you click the ellipses, you get a number of options.

  • Delete – obviously to delete the currently selected option
  • New – creates a new record, where you can give the saved value a label and you can define whether this view is for all users or not. Assigning the view to a specific user is done on the list page itself
  • Copy – creates a new record with the same values as the one that’s called “Last used options and filters”
  • Edit – This only works on custom views, and it runs the report’s request page where you can enter the options and filter values for the current view

You can assign the view to a specific user or share it with all users. If this capability is enabled for a report, you should be able to pick from the list of views right from the request page.

How To Enable This

You need to do two things to enable this capability.

  • First, you set the ‘SaveValues’ property on the report’s requestpage. If the report doesn’t have a requestpage, you can add one with just the property and no controls
  • Second, you need to run the report. When you first deploy the report with SaveValues turned on, it does not yet have a view saved. Run the report with any filter/option value and it should create this record for you
requestpage
{
    SaveValues = true;
}

A Little Hinky

To me it feels a little unfinished, like it was rushed into the system. To begin, it’s inconsistent in labeling. On the requestpage it is called “Use default values from” which is incorrect. This is about ‘saved’ values, not ‘default’ values. Then when you open the full list, it is labeled “Select – Report Settings” which again doesn’t feel right. I don’t consider filter values a ‘setting’. Then when you click ‘New’ it opens a screen that is captioned “Edit – Pick Report”… I mean come on… Finally, having to run the report in order to even get the dropdown is not very user friendly. When I first tested this I thought I had done something wrong because the dropdown would not show.

Another big drawback is that the SaveValues property is not available in Report Extensions. You’ll have to copy the standard object in order to provide the capability.

Regardless of its hinkiness and shortcomings, the feature itself is great, especially when you have periodic activities to run for different sets of filters. it’s really nice to have the ability to preconfigure sets of option/filter values. It has the potential to increase productivity and eliminate typos in entering filters. In my opinion, this feature should be enabled by default.

Document Attachments

One of my clients had asked me to add Document Attachments to Bank Deposits. Thinking this was a quick and easy one I added the factbox, set the link, and went on with my day. When my client said they see all attachments for all records, I realized it is a little more involved. It took some time to figure out how it actually works, and this post explains the whole thing, including how to get document attachments through the posting process.

How Does it Really Work?

The reason why it’s not so simple is because the Document Attachment works with RecRef instead of a hardcoded table relationship. Take a look at the Document Attachment table (table number 1173 in the base app) for the field definitions. I’ll focus on single field PK records in this post, so tables where a single Code20 field has the unique identifier of the record. The more complex compound PK works the same, you just need to set more fields.

Standard BC has a limited number of tables that have document attachment capabilities. If you want to add another table, whether a custom table or another standard table, you will need to subscribe to some events to make that work. Let’s first look at how standard document attachments work.

Open Document Attachments

Let’s take a look at the Customer Card page in standard BC. The “Attachments” action has the following OnAction trigger code:

trigger OnAction()
var
    DocumentAttachmentDetails: Page "Document Attachment Details";
    RecRef: RecordRef;
begin
    RecRef.GetTable(Rec);
    DocumentAttachmentDetails.OpenForRecRef(RecRef);
    DocumentAttachmentDetails.RunModal();
end;

The “Document Attachment Details” page is where the magic happens. If you drill down into the ‘OpenForRecRef’ function, you will see that it takes a RecRef variable (which in this example is looking at the current Customer record) and sets filter on the table ID of the RecRef and the value of the PK field of the record itself. This is the function that defines all the tables in the standard BC app that have Document Attachments.

The important thing in this function is the call to OnAfterOpenForRecRef, which is an event publisher that we will subscribe to later. This event gives you the capability to set a filter to any table. Note that this is just a filter on a page. All that this does is make sure that you only see the document attachments for this particular record.

The Document Attachments Factbox

Another way to give the user access to the document attachments is the “Document Attachment Factbox” that you can see in the factboxes area. In the standard app on the Customer Card, the SubPageLink property links the “Table ID” field to a hardcoded value 18 (which is Customer table’s object id). If you want to create your own link, you should use the table name instead of its number. So we will be linking to the “Bank Deposit Header” table, so our constant value will be Database::”Bank Deposit Header”.

Take a look at the OnDrillDown trigger of the NumberOfRecords field in the factbox. It first sets up the RecRef, which is again hardcoded for the standard range of tables that have document attachments. Then it executes the same logic on the Document Attachment Details page as the action mentioned above.

Note the OnBeforeDrillDown function call in the ‘else’ leg of the ‘case’ statement. This is the event that you need to subscribe to in order to properly filter the document attachments for non-standard tables.

What is important to understand about this particular factbox is that records are not entered directly into the factbox. You have to click an action that adds the record, and as a result the “No.” field in the factbox is NOT populated by the page link.

Creating New Document Attachments

So far we’ve only looked at how to display the proper document attachments to the user. What’s left is how BC actually stores these records. The part that is tricky is not about getting the file itself, but how BC gets the value from the RecRef. The function that stores the values from the RecRef into the document attachment is called InitFieldsFromRecRef. You can see that this function again goes through all of the same hard coded standard BC tables that we’ve seen before, and it provides an event publisher called OnAfterInitFieldsFromRecRef that you can use for additional tables.

Document Attachments for Additional Tables

Alright, now let’s put it all together for a new table. I recently added this for Bank Deposits for a client of mine, so I’ll use the same table to illustrate. I’ll focus on the new ‘Bank Deposit Header’ and its Posted sibling. The new implementation of bank deposits can be found in the “_Exclude_Bank Deposits” app that is part of standard BC.

To get started, create a page extension for the Bank Deposit and the Posted Bank Deposit pages, and add the Document Attachment factbox. You can copy this from the Customer Card and change the links appropriately. Note that the records that you will see when you drill down into the details are filtered on the table but not by the PK value of the record that you are looking at. In other words, just adding this factbox will only give you a list of all the Document Attachments that are linked to ALL (Posted) Bank Deposits.

Finally, create a new codeunit, I called mine ‘DocAttachmentSubs’.

Filter the Details

First, we need to make sure that the “Document Attachment Details” page is filtered on the correct Bank Deposit number. For this we subscribe to the OnAfterOpenForRecRef event.

[EventSubscriber(ObjectType::Page, Page::"Document Attachment Details", 'OnAfterOpenForRecRef', '', true, true)]
local procedure DocAttDetailsPageOnAfterOpenForRecRef(var DocumentAttachment: Record "Document Attachment"; var RecRef: RecordRef)
var
    MyFieldRef: FieldRef;
    RecNo: Code[20];
begin
    if RecRef.Number in [Database::"Bank Deposit Header", Database::"Posted Bank Deposit Header"] then begin
        MyFieldRef := RecRef.Field(1); // field 1 is the "No." field in both tables
        RecNo := MyFieldRef.Value();
        DocumentAttachment.SetRange("No.", RecNo);
    end;
end;

Filter the Factbox

Next, we need to make sure that the details are filtered properly when the user clicks the DrillDown from the document attachment factbox. For this we subscribe to the OnBeforeDrillDown event in the factbox.

[EventSubscriber(ObjectType::Page, Page::"Document Attachment Factbox", 'OnBeforeDrillDown', '', true, true)]
local procedure DocAttFactboxOnBeforeDrillDown(DocumentAttachment: Record "Document Attachment"; var RecRef: RecordRef)
var
    BankDepositHeader: Record "Bank Deposit Header";
    PostedBankDepositHeader: Record "Posted Bank Deposit Header";
begin
    case DocumentAttachment."Table ID" of
        Database::"Bank Deposit Header":
            begin
                RecRef.Open(Database::"Bank Deposit Header");
                if BankDepositHeader.Get(DocumentAttachment."No.") then
                    RecRef.GetTable(BankDepositHeader);
            end;
        Database::"Posted Bank Deposit Header":
            begin
                RecRef.Open(Database::"Posted Bank Deposit Header");
                if PostedBankDepositHeader.Get(DocumentAttachment."No.") then
                    RecRef.GetTable(PostedBankDepositHeader);
            end;
    end;
end;

So now when the user clicks the drilldown, BC will set the RecRef to look at the (Posted) Bank Deposit, which is then sent into the details page, which then knows how to properly filter.

Set the Right Link

The last thing we need is to make sure that new document attachments have the (Posted) Bank Deposit number, by subscribing to the OnAfterInitFieldsFromRecRef event of the Document Attachment table itself.

[EventSubscriber(ObjectType::Table, Database::"Document Attachment", 'OnAfterInitFieldsFromRecRef', '', true, true)]
local procedure DocAttTableOnAfterInitFieldsFromRecRef(var DocumentAttachment: Record "Document Attachment"; var RecRef: RecordRef)
var
    MyFieldRef: FieldRef;
    RecNo: Code[20];
begin
    if RecRef.Number in [Database::"Bank Deposit Header", Database::"Posted Bank Deposit Header"] then begin
        MyFieldRef := RecRef.Field(1); // field 1 is the "No." field in both tables
        RecNo := MyFieldRef.Value();
        DocumentAttachment.Validate("No.", RecNo);
    end;
end;

You should now be able to create new document attachments for unposted and posted bank deposits. All that’s left is to get document attachments to flow through the posting process.

Posting

Document Attachments are not intrinsically difficult. In the end they are just records in the database. The records are identified by their Table ID and their PK values. For Bank Deposits the PK is a single Code20 field, and there are two versions of the table. All we need to do is write a little loopyloopy that reads the records for the unposted record, copy it into the posted record, and get rid of the old ones. Would be cool to just change the records, but since both the Table ID and the record identifier are all part of the PK, you can’t do a ‘Rename’ because then you’d have to sit there and click confirmations all day long.

For Bank Deposits, you can use the OnAfterBankDepositPost event in the “Bank Deposit-Post” codeunit.

[EventSubscriber(ObjectType::Codeunit, Codeunit::"Bank Deposit-Post", 'OnAfterBankDepositPost', '', true, true)]
local procedure BankDepositPostOnAfterBankDepositPost(BankDepositHeader: Record "Bank Deposit Header"; var PostedBankDepositHeader: Record "Posted Bank Deposit Header")
begin
    MoveAttachmentsToPostedDeposit(Database::"Bank Deposit Header", BankDepositHeader."No.",
                                    Database::"Posted Bank Deposit Header", PostedBankDepositHeader."No.");
end;

local procedure MoveAttachmentsToPostedDeposit(FromTableId: Integer; FromNo: Code[20]; ToTableId: Integer; ToNo: Code[20])
var
    FromDocumentAttachment: Record "Document Attachment";
    ToDocumentAttachment: Record "Document Attachment";
begin
    FromDocumentAttachment.SetRange("Table ID", FromTableId);
    FromDocumentAttachment.SetRange("No.", FromNo);

    if FromDocumentAttachment.FindSet() then begin
        repeat
            Clear(ToDocumentAttachment);
            ToDocumentAttachment.Init();
            ToDocumentAttachment.TransferFields(FromDocumentAttachment);
            ToDocumentAttachment.Validate("Table ID", ToTableId);
            ToDocumentAttachment.Validate("No.", ToNo);
            ToDocumentAttachment.Insert(true);
        until FromDocumentAttachment.Next() = 0;
        FromDocumentAttachment.DeleteAll();
    end;
end;

I have this in a separate function because I also had to make it work for the old Deposit implementation. You could totally combine this into a single event subscriber.

I’m thinking about creating a video about this topic. Let me know if this was useful in the comments and if you’d like to see the video.

Formatting Booleans

As you know, boolean fields are presented as a checkbox in BC. The issue with that is that checkboxes themselves have no formatting properties. There are a couple of different ways to change the appearance of boolean fields, read on if you want to know what they are.

One of the apps I work on has a custom journal, in which we use the StyleExpr to color fields based on a number of checks on the record. Over time, we’ve added this functionality to a bunch of fields. You have to scroll to the right to check all the fields, so we added a field called ‘Has Alerts’ to tell the user that something is up with this record. My client didn’t like the standard checkbox and asked if we can show the field as ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

I asked Twitter for help and got a few responses:

Use the OnDrillDown Trigger

Some of the old quirks of NAV made their way into BC, and one of them is that the simple act of adding a trigger can modify the behavior of page controls.

Image
Using the OnDrillDown trigger

As you can see, the code in the trigger is absolutely meaningless. All we are doing is setting a dummy variable, and the mere presence of this trigger causes the boolean to be presented as a text. The StyleExpr property is tied to a variable that is set in the OnAfterGetCurrentRecord trigger of the page itself. I don’t like this solution because the trigger has no meaning. The field values become clickable, but because the code is bogus, the user will want to click something that does nothing. Of course there could be situations where you actually want to do something in the drilldown, in which case this is perfectly acceptable.

Format the Field

The winning suggestion was to include the Format command in the SourceExpr of the control. So elegant, and makes sense right. The page recognizes that the source is a text, and presents the Yes/No variation of the boolean.

Image
Formatting the SourceExpr

I like this because the field value is not clickable, just a text value. Just a quick tip, nothing earth shattering, but something that I know I’ll want to use some time in the future.

Obsolete But Not Gone

This post was born out of a bit of an embarrassing situation, in which I had to obsolete some fields from an AppSource app. Just a quick one to let you know what the official process is, and also that you don’t have to wait for the next major version of BC to fully obsolete a field.

The ‘Situation’

This app has table extensions for the Sales Line table and the posted sales line tables (invoice and credit memo). Not until their first live implementation did we find out that the field numbers in the credit memo line table were not aligned, so at that point BC will yell at you that field types are not compatible. Oops….

For those that don’t understand, let me explain. Field values in the Sales Line table are copied to their posted counterparts by a command called ‘TransferFields’. This command basically copies all the field values from the source table into the target table. Couple things to note: the fields must have the same field numbers, and they must have the same data types. In our case, we had fields 1 and 2 in the Sales Line table, and their corresponding fields in the posted credit memo line had field numbers 2 and 3. The posting process tried to put a number 2 value into field number 1, with the predictable result that there was a data type mismatch.

Why is this a problem? Can’t you just change the field number? Well no, because once an app is published on AppSource, you are not allowed to make any ‘breaking changes’, and renumbering a field is considered a breaking change. Doesn’t matter how I personally feel about that (I don’t agree that field numbers are breaking) and so we did not have any other choice but to use the obsoletion process.

As a side note – yes this exposed a serious issue in our process. Posting a credit memo had clearly not been tested, and matching field numbers is something that a BC developer with my experience should never have a problem with. To my client’s credit: no fingers were pointed, we addressed the issue, and we shared the cost of fixing it.

Obsoleting a Field

Alright, so the official process of obsoleting a field is described in the ‘deprecation guidelines‘. Skip the preprocessing piece if you have not seen that before, and focus on the steps in making code obsolete. There are plenty of blog posts that explain the process itself, so I will not go into any detail.

My main concern was how fast can we get this into AppSource. The process to make a field obsolete has two stages:

  • First, the ObsoleteState of the field is set to ‘Pending’.
    • This means that the field has been marked, but it can still be used in the app
    • The purpose of this stage is to flag the code to any party that has an extension of the code, so that they can take steps to address the change
    • All references to the field will be shown in the VSCode problems window with a warning. There is a reason and a tag property that is used to define which in BC version the change will become permanent
  • Second, the ObsoleteState of the field is set to ‘Removed’.
    • In this state, the field still exists but it cannot be used any longer
    • All references to the field will show up as errors in the problems list

There is a perfectly valid reason why there are two steps. My concern was how long it would take us to get the fields to be removed. The documentation does not address the required AppSource timeline, and I could not find any definite answers in Yammer. The only timeline reference that I could find in any Microsoft documentation was that code must be in ‘Pending’ state for one entire major version. This issue came up in early October, days after 2022 wave 2 was released. If this was true, we would have to wait until 2023 wave 1 (April next year!!) to get the fields obsoleted.

What We Did

Some partners assured me that there is no mandatory wait time for a whole major cycle. The intention of that timeline is not to limit partners but a practice that Microsoft uses. This is to make sure that the partners always have at least one full release cycle to address any compatibility issues due to obsolete code in the base app.

So, with that in mind we went to work. What saved us is that this particular app only had one implementation live, so all we had to do is make sure that they upgrade the app to the ‘Pending’ version as soon as humanly possible. Depending on the number of live implementations you have, this could take longer. I actually don’t even know if there is a dashboard where you can see the live versions that are in use.

I have to say that I was very impressed with how smooth the process of pushing a new version of an app into AppSource is now. After properly testing the change, we pushed the ‘Pending’ app to AppSource, and that was done and ready to publish within a day. The end user then upgraded the app, and we pushed the ‘Removed’ app to AppSource right away. We were able to address the issue within days, and the client lived happily ever after.

PowerShell Duration

This is a really quick tip just for myself to save the script where I can easily get to it, this time a quick way to output the duration of a PowerShell script. When a script takes longer than expected, in my mind I am waiting HOURS for it to complete but it is probably just a minute or two. I’ve run into this before, where I spend WAY too much time trying to locate a good, easy way to output the duration of a script. Without further ado, here’s the PowerShell code:

$startTime = Get-Date

<insert your script here>

$myTimeSpan = New-TimeSpan -Start $startTime -End (Get-Date)

Write-Output ("Execution time was {0} minutes and {1} seconds." -f $myTimeSpan.Minutes, $myTimeSpan.Seconds)

The key elements here being

  • I was looking for a ‘Time’ function and didn’t realize that in PowerShell you actually need to use the ‘Date’ object to access the time. Get-Date returns a DateTime stamp
  • Coming from BC, I was looking for something called ‘duration’, so it took quite a bit of time to find out about New-TimeSpan. This creates a ‘TimeSpan’ object that has its own members for easy concatenation of a user-friendly message. I’m only using minutes and seconds here

Hopefully next time I need this I will remember to search my own blog 🙂

Reports to Excel

Just a quick post about the new reporting capability to use Excel for the layout. It’s been out for a while now (it came out in v20 or 2022 wave 1), but there was a tweet earlier this year to point out some FAQs and some samples to get you started on it. Personally I haven’t had the time to really get into it but I wanted to share this so it doesn’t get lost.

Kind of a Big Deal

I have a feeling that this new capability is being underrated, to me this is really kind of a big deal. We all know how difficult it is to use RDLC, and I’ve been able to keep report development at a minimum. Now that we have the Excel layout as a new target, I can’t help but feel like this is the main direction that reporting will go (that and PowerBI of course, but that’s a whole other story). I would not be surprised if Excel will be playing a much more important role now that we can use it as the target for report objects.

OK so here’s the tweet, it was posted back in March and I had bookmarked it at the time to look at later.

What I think is really cool about the way some people in the BC team interact with the community, is that they will keep track of what the community is sharing, and actually promote these posts in their own documentation. Granted, the GitHub repo is no official documentation, but they DO link to community blog posts in there.

Like I said I still haven’t taken the time to dig in, but I wanted to get this posted not to lose the link. This will surely be enough to get started and get your feet wet with Excel Layouts.

Remove BC Bloatware

The number of apps that come with a standard container has exploded over the past handful of releases. My local setup involves doing development in Hyper-V virtual machines, so local system resources are at a premium. It is very easy to trim the fat so to speak, so read on if you want to know how.

What’s with these apps?

From foreign languages to IRS reports. From integration and migration tools to email functionality and even connectors to external systems like the Spotify app. Having these in separate apps is great, because it is very easy to get rid of them.

The downside is that each app comes with its own set of table extensions, which are implemented as companion tables. Each time that a database action is taken against the main table, the system also has to maintain each companion table. Multiply this issue with the number of companies in your system and you can imagine the performance hit this could take.

Funny as it seems if you know what my desk looks like, but I HATE clutter in the extension list, especially if it is functionality that I just don’t ever use. I will NEVER have a need to use the Norwegian language, nor will I EVER need to use the Paypal links in a local container. In other words, I will never need to use the vast majority of these apps. Most importantly though I had started noticing a real slowing down of the performance in my local containers. I had even started wondering if it is time to replace my machine.

Get rid of these apps!

Lucky for us, it is VERY easy to get rid of apps. The BCContainerHelper module has two commands for you. One is UnInstall-BcContainerApp, which we will use in today’s post. The second one is UnPublish-BcContainerApp, which is useful in case you want to completely get rid of the app altogether. If you want to be a real ninja about it, follow the links to see the underlying PowerShell logic that you can use for inspiration. Me, I like to keep it simple, so I’ll use the BCContainerHelper Cmdlets.

If you were thinking ‘never say never’ when you were reading the previous paragraph, you were absolutely right. What if I get a Norwegian customer tomorrow? Let’s use the uninstall Cmdlet. This will leave the app in the system, ready to be installed again at a later date

UnInstall-BcContainerApp `
    -containerName 'MyContainer' `
    -name 'Shopify Connector' `
    -doNotSaveData `
    -doNotSaveSchema `
    -force
  • The name of the app is enough to uninstall the app. You could also specify the publisher and version if you want but for our purposes the name is enough since all apps in the standard container are published by Microsoft
  • The ‘doNotSaveData’ parameter is used to make sure that the data is deleted from the companion tables, important because we are going to get rid of those with the next parameter
  • The ‘doNotSaveSchema’ parameter is used to remove the companion tables from the system. If you do not set this parameter, the schema will remain in the app database

If you are absolutely certain that you will never use the app, you can use the UnPublish Cmdlet instead and REALLY clean up that app list.

Bonus Company Removal

The standard container also comes with a pre-configured company called ‘My Company’ that I personally never use, and we have a command to remove that too:

Remove-CompanyInBcContainer `
    -containerName 'MyContainer' `
    -companyName 'My Company'

Get rid of half the companies, get rid of 50% of the unnecessary companion tables.

Put it All Together

In my personal ‘arsenal’ of goodies, I keep a set of scripts to create new containers. One of those is a script called ‘RemoveBloatware.ps1’ that lists just about every app in the standard container, something like this:

$MyContainerName = 'MyContainer'

Remove-CompanyInBcContainer `
    -containerName $MyContainerName `
    -companyName 'My Company'

UnInstall-BcContainerApp `
    -containerName $MyContainerName `
    -name 'AMC Banking 365 Fundamentals' `
    -doNotSaveData `
    -doNotSaveSchema `
    -force

UnInstall-BcContainerApp `
    -containerName $MyContainerName `
    -name 'Business Central Cloud Migration - Previous Release' `
    -doNotSaveData `
    -doNotSaveSchema `
    -force

UnInstall-BcContainerApp `
    -containerName $MyContainerName `
    -name 'Business Central Cloud Migration - Previous Release (US)' `
    -doNotSaveData `
    -doNotSaveSchema `
    -force

UnInstall-BcContainerApp `
    -containerName $MyContainerName `
    -name 'Shopify Connector' `
    -doNotSaveData `
    -doNotSaveSchema `
    -force

# etcetera, add any app that you don't want

Now you can call this script from your NewContainer script and have a nicely trimmed container. It made a real difference for me, I can really notice the better performance. Very useful when you’re in the thick of coding and you need to deploy code changes frequently.

Dynamic Enums

Although enums are static lists of values, there is a way to restrict which values can be used. With this post I will show you how to do that, and how you can dynamically set up how this happens.

Didn’t Think it was Possible

I didn’t think dynamic enums were possible but I asked the question on Twitter anyway. The golden tip was a page property called ‘ValuesAllowed’. As I was figuring out how to use this property I thought I’d write this blog post. When I returned to Twitter to post my findings, there were two more links to some other people’s articles in the replies. I’ve since removed much of the details from this post, since they are essentially the same. Go and follow the links in the Tweet replies to read those details.

Both replies cover an essentially hard coded way to restrict option values. I want to take this one step further, where we provide a setup field that is used to manage the choices that you see. Now… I have to say I do NOT like using a static list of options for this purpose. We are still looking at a static list of values, and we are hardcoding what is visible. In my real-world scenario we had to put something in place quickly, and this was indeed a very quick ‘fix’.

Scenario

My actual scenario involved a rather controversial topic, so let’s use a silly scenario instead. We add a field to the Customer table called ‘Dessert Choice’, with an enum type that has 4 values: <blank>, Icecream, Cookies, and ‘Choice Declined’. You need an enum object, a table extension with a field based on the enum, and a page extension to add the field to the Customer Card. Let’s say you want to restrict the ‘Choice Declined’ option. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, you add a ‘ValuesAllowed’ property to the field on the page extension, and you specify the values that you do want to allow.

In my real-world scenario, my client needed a way to restrict the available options for one company, and provide all of them in others. What we ended up doing was add a toggle to a setup table to turn this restriction on or off.

Show Me The Code

As per usual I was writing and writing, using SO MANY words to describe the situation, and decided to just give you the page extension itself, assuming that you can figure out the fields that I am using.

pageextension 60000 CustomerCardDnStr extends "Customer Card"
{
    layout
    {
        addafter(Name)
        {
            field(DessertChoice; Rec.DessertChoice)
            {
                ApplicationArea = All;
                ToolTip = 'Specifies...';
                Visible = AllVisible;
            }
            field(RestrictedDessertChoice; Rec.DessertChoice)
            {
                ApplicationArea = All;
                ToolTip = 'Specifies...';
                ValuesAllowed = Blank, Icecream, Cookies;
                Visible = (not AllVisible);
            }
        }
    }

    var
        MySetup: Record MySetupDnStr;
        AllVisible: Boolean;

    trigger OnOpenPage()
    begin
        MySetup.GetRecordOnce();
        AllVisible := MySetup.AllowDecline;
    end;
}

Basically you create multiple controls in the page extension for the same field, and you toggle visibility based on a field in a setup table. You could even do this at a record level in a list, by using an InDataSet variable, and putting the code in the OnAfterGetCurrRecord trigger. Again, I’m thinking this should have been done with a table with actual functionality, but this way uses very little code and we had to put something in very quickly.

That’s it, nothing fancy. Not very clever, but useful in my client’s scenario.

Partial Records with SetLoadFields

Fetching and updating records has historically been the greatest culprit of performance problems. The standard way that BC retrieves records is very expensive, since it will always get ALL the fields of a table (and its brethren companion tables). This post covers a (relatively) new option called SetLoadFields, which is used to specify the fields that you want to retrieve.

So What’s the Problem?

The database engine for BC is SQL Server for OnPrem and Azure SQL for SaaS; the business logic translates database operations into T-SQL statements at run time. By default, it issues a SELECT * and that means that for every standard database call, BC retrieves ALL fields from the table. Good for us developers because we never have to think about which fields to fetch. From a performance point of view though this causes a MASSIVE superfluous overhead in data traffic. Some of the most used tables in BC have bazillions of fields, and in any business logic scenario you never need more than a handful of fields.

The problem is exacerbated by the presence of table extensions. Each table extension is represented in the SQL database by a companion table that shares the primary key with the main table. Every time that you retrieve records from the main table, the system also retrieves the fields from the companion tables by issuing a JOIN on the PK fields. You can imagine a popular table like the Sales Line with a dozen table extensions; a SalesLine.FindSet command generates a SQL statement that includes a dozen JOINs.

The problem is that the number of fields that are included in SQL statements has a disproportionate effect on query performance. Read the post that I link to below for more details, but what you need to know is that the same query with all fields can take hundreds of times more than retrieving just half a dozen fields.

Only Get What you Need

To eliminate this overhead, we now have a SetLoadFields command. Basically, what you can do with this command is to define the fields that are included in the SQL statement. Instead of getting all fields and get data that you will never use, you tell BC that you only want your handful of fields.

Need an address from a Vendor? The external document number from an invoice? An Inventory Posting Group from an Item? You don’t have to read 6 million fields to do that anymore.

procedure ShowSomeCode()
var
    Vendor: Record Vendor;
begin
    Vendor.SetLoadFields(Address,"Address 2",City,"Post Code");
    Vendor.Get('10000');
    // do stuff with the address fields and ignore the rest
end;

This code sample generates a SQL statement with a SELECT on just those few fields that are defined in the SetLoadFields command, and it should ignore the companion tables altogether since these are all main table fields.

Read the documentation here and make sure you read how to use it here. For more technical in-depth information on what to do and what happens under the hood (way above my head there), read Mads’ posts here and here.

New Habits

In my day-to-day life as a BC developer I don’t normally see SetLoadFields commands. I even checked the standard objects and it’s actually quite surprising how little it is used there. In a previous life I did a LOT of performance troubleshooting, and this would have been a tremendous help in solving lots of performance problems. I know I will try to make using this command a habit.