Category Archives: Uncategorized

How to generate Azure Containers Instances loaded with Business Central in minutes

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To start writing extensions for Business Central we have a few choices: installing locally one of the release candidates that comes in the same format as any other Dynamics NAV DVD packages, creating a locally hosted docker sandbox, or in Azure as a container instance.

As the process of getting your container takes just a few minutes, I prefer to do my extensions testing and development in an Azure container.

To generate my Azure container with Business Central I started by installing Azure CLI for Windows. You can also use chocolatey to install Azure CLI on your local machine.

In Visual Studio Code click on Terminal and in a powershell session start your Azure work by logging in your Azure account with

“az login“

1.Azure Login

If logged in already and want to check account logged info:

az_account_show

Next, we need to create a resource group, which is a logical container in Azure, something like an organization unit in Active Directory or a folder for Windows files.

The command is “az group create” and takes two parameters: group name and location:

create group

Once the resource group is created we can create the azure container instance loaded with the latest Business Central using the following Azure command:

“az container create”

containerIn the image above,

  • the group in which the container will be created follows “-g” (group) option: “svrg”
  • the name of the container follows the “-n” (name) option: “d365bc-az-cont-us-cont”
  • the image loaded on this container is stored here: “Microsoft/bcsandbox:latest”
  • the OS is Windows
  • We can only enter 5 ports: 80,7046, 7048, 7049, 8080

For a complete list of parameters for “az container create”, check this.

To check the logs, find the credentials to log in recorded by Azure for the previous command run “Az container logs” like below:

logs

As you have seen above, the admin credentials are displayed and the new Azure Business Central instance appears ready for connections. Lets check by browsing on the link for the web client:

Ctrl + Click on the web client link in the picture above opens the Business Central web client:

webclient

To see the newly container page in Azure navigate to the resource group and then to your container:

az_container_page

After entering the credentials from the logs we are in:

inbc

Good! We’ve got a Business Central instance in Azure running in a container and we’re ready to code and test extensions!

To get into this container in Visual Studio Code generate with AL:Go command a new AL project and change in launch.json the value for server token to the container dns name created above:

vscode to azure

In the next blog I’ll go through the steps of deploying an Azure container loaded with a Business Central image using deployment templates with parameters.

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

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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.

Day-to-day NAV: Upgrade codeunits

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Starting with NAV 2015 there is an easier way to migrate data between old and new structures of NAV tables.

From msdn excerpt, the upgrade codeunits role is to provide “the logic for migrating existing data in the business data table from the old format to the new format after schema synchronization”.

When we operate a change to the structure of a table the system will detect there are discrepancies between what we just saved through the development environment and what is current in SQL Server.

When we save the object we can switch between three options available for “Synchronize schema”. By default the value is “Now – with validation”.  If we choose “Later” the object is saved but no schema synchronization is performed. If we choose “Force”, the object is saved and the new structure is operated at the SQL Server  level with potential data loss.

If we choose “Now – with validation”, the system will attempt to synchronize schema and because there are structural changes it will check the existence of an upgrade codeunit that can perform the changes without data loss. If such an upgrade unit does not exist we get the error above.

To see the upgrade codeunit in action, I will:

  1. Create a table
  2. Populate it
  3. Change its structure:
    • change the ID# of a field
    • change the data type of a field
    • insert new field in the freed ID#
  4. Confirm schema sync error
  5. Create upgrade codeunit
  6. Attempt to save the object with Schema Synchronization “Now – with validation”
  7. Start the upgrade process
  8. Check upgrade output

Let’s create a table, populate it with some data and attempt to change its structure.

1. Create a table similar to the one below:

1-table

2. Create a codeunit to populate the newly created table:

codeunit-populate

   3. Let’s change the structure of the table as following:

  • ID 6 Status (Option) -> ID 20 Status (Option) [Update1]
  • ID 4 Field_3 (Integer) -> ID 4 Field_3(Code10) [Update2]
  • ID 6 Description (Text30) (new field) [Update3]

Check the current status of the table pre-upgrade in Management Studio

struct-pre-upgrade

4. If trying to save the object with Schema synchronization “Now – with validation” after [Update1] and [Update2] we get this error:

error1

If we try to save the object after [Update1],[Update2] and [Update3]

we get this error:

error2

Notice how the system reports only the last update for field 6, I assume because the Update1 is not committed.

5. Let’s now create the upgrade codeunit:

Start by setting up the Subtype property of the codeunit to “Upgrade”.

The codeunit consists of two functions:

  • A function that will back up the data from our table into a temporary table. [My temporary table is pretty much a copy of the original table. But if you’re not changing a lot of fields in your process, I suggest having in your temp table just the fields in the primary key and the fields that are affected.]. Set the FunctionType property of this function to TableSyncSetup.

tablesyncsetupfnA function that will populate the new structure with the data from the temporary backup table … something like a “forced” schema synchronization with data restore from a backup. Set the FunctionType property of this function to UpgradePerCompany

restoredata

6. Save the object (compile option for schema synchronization Now – with validation). No errors should be encountered at this point if the upgrade codeunit was created.

7. Start the upgrade from the development environment (Tools-Data Upgrade – Start …) or if you prefer powershell, run in Administration Shell: Start-NAVDataUpgrade [InstanceName]

8. Check the content of the table:

afterupgrade

I used upgrade codeunits in day-to-day tasks(recently changing the data type of a field from integer to code), and in upgrade projects when existent fields have been relocated to different IDs.

When the Data Upgrade processes is suspended you can identify potential errors in your upgrade codeunit by running a powershell command: Get-NAVDataUpgrade [InstanceName] -ErrorOnly

But it’s not possible to step through the codeunit with the debugger … or, to be more precise, I couldn’t find how.

Sample code here.