Tips & Tricks

My last topic was resident control add-ins . In my video and written blog I’ve explained what they are and how you can quickly have them up and running. However, there was one particular thing I said I generally don’t like – single-instance codeunits.

One of the most common questions I get asked about Control Add-ins is whether you can make a control add-in be always present and able to respond to your calls from AL. In other words: can you have a resident control add-in that you can invoke from anywhere in your AL code. I’ve done a lot about control add-ins.

If you missed my From JavaScript to AL and back: SkipIfBusy live session on January 8, or if you simply prefer to read rather than watch, then this post is for you. As promised, I’ll follow up in writing on all my video blogs, so here we go.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.