Business Central Development

One of the more effective, and probably completely unexpected, demos at Waldo’s and mine NAV TechDays 2018 session was the user profile picture demo. I say “completely unexpected” is that it shows something that you normally don’t expect from control add-ins.

Eric Sevareid famously said that the chief cause of problems is solutions . The same applies to the HTML trick I blogged about yesterday. As soon as you solve the problem of using HTML directly in your control add-ins, another problem arises: what do you do with actual images your control add-in includes?

This will be my last post in the “JavaScript for (C/)AL Developers” series today. If I continued blogging about nearly pure JavaScript stuff, you could reasonably ask if this is in fact an NAV blog or a JavaScript one. It’s still NAV, and while the stuff I am about to write about is purely a JavaScript concept, I find it highly relevant for any control add-in developer.

I am on a spree today. The number of topics I wanted to blog about has accumulated, and I just decided to dump the stuff over here while I both feel the motivation and have time for blogging. However, in this hurry, I forgot to add some important content to my previous post .

In my previous post , I’ve written about the situation when you (or somebody you trust) redeclares the $ variable, thus inadvertently breaking all your jQuery code. I’ve also explained how to remedy for it inside the code you write by applying the Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE) or Self-Executing Anonymous Function pattern.

First, a disclaimer. This post is written for (C/)AL developers who are struggling with JavaScript, who copy and paste JavaScript code from Stack Overflow right into VS Code and are happy when it works, and confused when it doesn’t.

One of major limitations of control add-ins is not being able to define HTML. It seems so unbelievably unbelievable, that anyone looking at it from the outside of the NAV/BC playground may say “obviously, you must be missing something!”. But I am not.

Yes, I keep forgetting about “stuff”. First I forget about blogging in general, then I forget how to blog properly. I’ll get it sorted out. Eventually. Solemnly swear. Kind of. Anyway, my demos yesterday were full of screenshots. Useful stuff. You can copy a screenshot from there, paste it to OneNote 2016, then get the text from picture.

Long time no see, eh? Time flies, what do you know… I am thrilled to still find you here. Honestly, I wasn’t sure this morning if I was about to even find this blog where I left it seven months ago. Cool to find both my blog and you in good shape, patiently waiting for my contribution.

In my last post I announced a challenge: the first pull request on my TicTacToe for AL GitHub repository that contains a properly written event handler with “AI” that either beats the human player or ends in a draw gets a special reward. Honestly, I didn’t expect to see any submissions there, because NAV community is not too GitHub savvy.