Category Archives: AL

How to PowerApps with Business Central

Standard

PowerApps – Intro

What is PowerApps? PowerApps is a service for generating cross platform (iOS, Android, Windows Store) applications. It allows connectivity to different systems, comes up with cloud IDE and a cloud admin interface that allows users to publish apps targeting whatever platform you need. The IDE is called PowerApps Studio and can be downloaded from Windows Store locally on your machine or it can be used as a web application. I designed the app detailed below using the web application.

Most importantly, just like the other power tools, PowerBI and MS Flow, PowerApps is accessible not only to professional developers, but also business analysts, junior developers, or expert users in any company. I wrote this app without any code inside PowerApps Studio, just a few Excel functions invoked sporadically.

The quick PowerApps app I built required:

  • a PowerApps license. I got my free license here.
  • a NAV container hosted on Azure. You could build yours easily, some help here.

Application scope

The app will get from the Azure Business Central container the list of items via Item List page exposed as web service, and will present on the first screen the Item No. and Description for all items. App user can then advance into the details screen for each item. Here, if the Quantity is low the user can advance on a third screen where he can generate a purchase invoice for the desired quantity for the item and vendor selected. The result is that in Business Central the app will generate via a second web service a purchase invoice for the item, the vendor selected and the quantity entered.

Application design

There are two main parts to create your app:

  1. Create app connector
  2. Design app

1. Create app connectors

To create a Business Central connector go to the File menu in the PowerApps Studio and choose Connections:conn

 

The connector to the Azure BC Container instance looks like this:

 

new bc connector

Once the connector is set we can access all web services exposed in Business Central Azure Container.

2. Design PowerApps app

The PowerApps Studio comes with 3 main regions:

  1. Left Side is where you work with the screens. In this simple app I have 4 screens: Master, Detail, Order and Confirm.
  2. The center belongs to the canvas where you drop your controls
  3. Right side is occupied by the Data Source (if any) and the properties of the current control you selected on the canvas

 

studio screens

MasterScreen consists of a Galleria control (GalleriaItems) which contains a list of items retrieved via Items web service Data Source. You will see later that this web service is Page 31 exposed as web service in Business Central Azure Container.

OnSelect event for the Forward button has Navigate(screen,effect) function behind to advance to a certain screen in your app.

forwardbutton

The second screen, DetailScreen displays a bit more fields from Items web service.

detailscreen

If the inventory is low, the app user can decide to order more by clicking on “Order more” button:

orderscreen

Once the user enters the desired quantity to be included on a Business Central Purchase Invoice the app will create a POST request to a new ODATA web service data source (OrderItemVendorWS) and ultimately generate the purchase invoice with one purchase line.

Let’s see the app:

runappgiflast

 

And, in Business Central, the new purchase invoice:

purchaseinvoiceinbc

This is what was needed on the PowerApps side, but additionally, I needed to plug a few new things in Business Central.

Business Central Container changes

First, create a new AL project, and point Visual Studio Code to the azure container:

Launch.json:

launchjson

Web services:

  • Items service will support MasterScreen and DetailScreen
  • OrderItemVendorWS will support OrderScreen.

web servicesPage 50100 “PurchaseItemList” is a new page based on a new Table 50100 PurchaseItem:

Table 50100 PurchaseItem:

TabPurchaseItem

Page 50100 PurchaseItemList:

Pag50100PurchaseItemList

The Purchase Invoice is generated during OnInsert trigger on the new table:

InsertTrigger50100

Conclusions

Creating an app with PowerApps assumes 3 tasks:

  1. the app backend, the connectors to your apps
  2. the app design, done in PowerApps Studio
  3. Publishing and Management tasks

PowerApps comes with versioning and management capabilities of a few environments (E.g. Dev, QA, Prod). Once your app has been tested by PowerApps app users, you could export it from QA and import it in Prod and distributed it from there. Select Office and  Dynamics 365 plans will allow you to generate and manage these environments.

More specifically, if you go to web.powerapps.com and click on Solutions you will be able to follow (with the right license) Create a new environment link.

Some useful links:

 

Advertisements

Invoking Azure Functions to replace DOT NET calls in C/AL or AL

Standard

Recently Microsoft announced that dotnet can still be used with installations on premise of Dynamics 365 Business Central.

However, if our extension is to make it in the cloud the code leveraging dot net needs to be replaced with http api calls.

In this example I will show how a legacy C/AL code using dot net can be replaced with a call to an Azure function to achieve the original goal of validating a posting code.

Premise

  • Either Table 18 was modified and additional code was added in “Post Code” Validate trigger with Regex class entities to perform validation on post codes.
  • Or, the additional validation is executed when the Post Code Validate in standard is finished and a subscriber to Post Code Validate exists in our extension and is triggered, but still contains dot net code(RegularExpressions class entitites) as we’re only dealing with on-premise (target=internal in app.json)

Objective

I want the additional validation to be executed when the standard validation is finished and the additional validation to not contain dotnet calls.

Design

  1. In a new AL project add a new codeunit:

add_al_codeunit

2. The codeunit itself contains an event subscriber to Table18.Validate.PostCode.

(Use “teventsub” snippet to get the quick scaffolding of the event subscriber)

codeunit_content

When the subscriber is triggered we are executing an Azure Function call: azfnvalidate-us-ca-zipcode. We’re retrieving a json object whose content is : {“PCValid” : true} or {“PCValid” : false}.

3. Write the Azure Function with Visual Studio Code

Pre-requisites:

  • Azure subscription
  • install C# extension
  • Azure Function Core Tools extension
  • install .net core (use npm or chocolatey)
  • Azure CLI Tools

VSCodeExtensions

A good guide to get you started with Azure Functions is here.

Once you have the default “Hello World” Azure Function created, replace your Run function with:

azFn

Publishing the function in Azure should generate a record in your chosen storage:AzureFninPortal

Testing

  1. Once published we can quickly spin a test for the new Azure Function in a web browser window:

web_browser_test

2. Removing the “W” in the previous test, triggers the Azure Function to return above json.

web_browser_invalid_postcode

3. Let’s test now the validation in Business Central:

ezgif-3-34f9ae149c11

Therefore, to replace a set of dotnet calls we need a worker placed somewhere else other than in AL or C/AL and a caller of that worker services placed in the extension. In my example use a codeunit (caller) in the extension range with a subscriber event defined that calls an Azure function(worker).

What other methods are you employing to achieve similar results ?

If you liked this article bookmark my blog or follow me for more stuff about NAV and Business Central.

Dynamics 365 Business Central : Al Code Analyzers #TurnOnCops #Extensions #Permissions

Standard

When you turn On PerTenantExtensionCop in Visual Studio Code and you forgot to create a Permissions.xml file, you get a compile error in your extension.

In Visual Studio Code – > User Settings add an entry for al.codeAnalyzers token like below:

CodeCops

Without this flag turned on your extension compiles.

If you do set PerTenantExtensionCop and if you’re missing Permissions.xml, you’re going to get a compile error:

Compile Error

By Adding in the project root a file Permissions.xml the error is solved:

Success

More reading on code analyzers here.

Original post here.

Dynamics 365 Business Central : Extending Role Center headline with web service data, lists and dictionaries

Standard

So much to read, so little time … the speed at which Microsoft adds new Business Central and AL features is overwhelming 🙂

In this blog I’ll demonstrate how I was able to display weather temperature for 3 cities in Business Central role center headline.

ezgif-3-ef3a02f8f885

First, there are 9 headline role center pages in Business Central, with ID from 1440..1448.

headline pages

I will extend the headline role center for the page 1440 : “Headline RC Business Manager”, by adding three fields, one for each city and its temperature.

To record the three cities and their temperatures I am using here a list and a dictionary data structure.

Fields_And_DataStructures

This is followed by a querying of a weather web service and recording of the 3 cities and their temperatures in a dictionary:

Query Web Service

Commented is the response from the web service.

I need data stored in the following tokens:

  • $main.temp
  • $sys.country
  • name

For more info on how to parse web service response take a look at Mr. Kauffman blog.

json

I use a free web service for weather openweathermap. You need to create an account and you will get a free APPID when you complete the registration. You can only query the web service once every 10 minutes for the same location.

Finally, to load cities and their temperatures in your headline use the code below:

CityTemp

The complete pageextension object is included here.

That’s it … thanks for reading!

Original post here.