Book Image

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - Second Edition

By : Stefano Demiliani, Duilio Tacconi
5 (3)
Book Image

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - Second Edition

5 (3)
By: Stefano Demiliani, Duilio Tacconi

Overview of this book

This book dives straight into guiding you through the process of building real-world solutions with the AL language and Visual Studio Code. It emphasizes best practices and extensibility patterns to ensure your extensions are well-structured, maintainable, and meet the needs of modern businesses. You'll learn advanced AL techniques, report creation methods, debugging strategies, and how to leverage telemetries for monitoring. Additionally, it covers performance optimization practices and API integration to help you create efficient and interconnected solutions. With a focus on extension development, this new edition allows you to jump right into coding without spending time on setup processes. This book introduces new chapters covering essential tasks that Business Central developers frequently encounter, such as file handling and printing management. Finally, the book expands its scope by including chapters on various integration aspects, including VS Code extensions, GitHub DevOps, Azure services, and Power Platform integrations. We’ll wrap up by covering Copilot capabilities in Business Central and how you can create your own generative AI copilots. By mastering these concepts and techniques, you'll be well-equipped to create powerful and customized solutions that extend the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
19
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20
Index

Understanding AL project structure best practices

As we mentioned previously, an AL project is file-based. You have all your .al files inside a project folder. The main problem that you encounter when you start working with a complex project is how to structure the project. How do we organize the objects and the .al files?There's no written rule for this topic. What we could suggest is to avoid having all the objects (.al files) at the project root level, as shown in the following screenshot:

Graphical user interface, application Description automatically generated

Here, none of the objects are organized per business area and only sorted by file name. If you have a large number of objects, your object list will grow. And in real life scenarios, it will typically grow a lot, causing difficulties with handling and maintaining files.The most sought-after way of structuring your project could be to organize your files by object type, as shown in the following screenshot:

Graphical user interface, application Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Here, all the extension's code is inside the src folder. Then, all the objects...