Control Add-in

Well, control add-ins are not new in NAV 2016, they have been around for a long time now. But, they have been improved and this blog post is about these improvements. Of course, the improvements are exclusively in the Web client framework, not the Windows client, and I am educated-guessing here…

Not that I am saying it’s a good thing, but trial and error is a fairly common approach to debugging in the NAV world. We’ve all done it. Heck, even with the comprehensive testability framework built in, we all still do it more often than we’re happy to admit while sober.

In most of my JavaScript client extensibility demos, I develop the whole content of my resource ZIP files inside Visual Studio. When I press F6, magically my NAV gets updated with the latest version of JavaScript that I just wrote. So, how do I do that? Here’s the cookbook.

On Monday, June 15th I have delivered another session in Microsoft’s Road to Repeatability series of online demos about technical NAV features, this time covering Client Extensibility. The session went through both the .NET and JavaScript aspects of client extensibility, and again – I promised to post all of the demos and content from the session on my blog.

Yesterday I posted a quick tip, which quickly got some comments about it being wrong. Since I know people who commented were unlikely to say something incorrect, I went to check on, because I myself experienced difficulties that made me write that post.

(Update, 20.4.2015: As it turns out – this post is not entirely accurate, as pointed out by Johannes Sebastian. Please read the next post to learn more about which parts are, and which aren’t correct.) Control Add-ins written in C# are not cross-version compatible.

Many cool things often go undocumented. I’ve just stumbled upon one of those, and it comes in handy to close this year of blogging. Imagine this situation: you have a server-side .NET object, that you want to pass on to the client.

First of all, thank you all who attended my session today. It was a lot of people in the room, and with the competition from Microsoft talking about a very hot topic in the other, bigger room, I really wouldn’t expect to see all of you there.

When interacting with custom controls on your pages from C/AL, you must be absolutely sure that the control has been instantiated. If it is not, you’ll get an error such as this: The reason why this happens is that C/AL code gets to execute before the page has been rendered, and thus also before the custom controls have been instantiated.

One more great Directions EMEA event is over, and it was a great experience again. I am a bit sorry, though, that my main focus was delivering presentations, so I enjoyed myself less mingling around, meeting new folks and consuming content. But it was still a great event.