Business Central Development

Control add-ins have always been my passion. Not only because I’ve been working with JavaScript since 1996, and I could call it my mother tongue, but because I just love how they allow us to create amazing user interfaces.

There is a particular programming language feature that I’ve always missed in AL (and C/AL for that matter): interfaces. I’ve dreamt about it , then blogged about it , then finally created a feature request in Microsoft’s AL GitHub repository .

This year’s NAV TechDays was again an amazing event. More than 1400 participants, 18 sessions, great content, it again surpassed the records set last year. It was an honor and a pleasure to be able to speak again.

Now that you are done through this mouthful of the title, you may recognize that it’s the method you invoke when you want to run a control add-in trigger in AL from JavaScript. There is nothing new about this method itself, it’s just that most people aren’t aware of full power of this method, and they are using this method in a very inefficient way.

Long time no see here, for I don’t know which time. That’s how it is these days, life kicks in, work kicks in, stuff kicks in, and then time flies and months go between posts here. I am currently delivering my “Developing Control Add-ins using AL language” workshop at the first pre-conf day of NAV…

This post has been long overdue. I’ve had it in my to-do list for nearly four years now, but it always ended up in the not today category. Funny how many times I’ve implemented it already, and how many times I’ve presented this, and I never ever found a few minutes to create a demo repository and a blog to come with it.

Out-of-the-box Business Central APIs often use complex types. Addresses on entities and documents, line details, units of measures, journal dimensions, these are just a few examples. There may be more. A typical instance of a complex type looks like this: The question is: can you do something like this in your own custom APIs?

Nearly two and a half years ago I had a dream. It was about codeunit references and codeunit interfaces . And today, nearly two and a half years later I am still here, still having the same dream. We still cannot do codeunit interfaces in AL. But it doesn’t mean we don’t need them. We do. We badly do.

Happy new year everyone! Last year was a bit slow for me, until the very end, when I churned out a year’s worth of posts just in two days. I hope this year to be a bit different, and let me kick-start it with a concept I’ve been playing with recently.

The last of the NAV TechDays 2018 demo series comes with a little story. While Waldo and I were preparing the “Evolution of the Titan” session, on Sunday before the conference, we were brainstorming the ideas of what would constitute a cool non-visual JavaScript demo.