MSDYN365BC - Object Designer for AL.

Hi Readers,

In today's article, we will be discussing a great VS Code extension. I am using that extension and I loved the extension.

The extension is built by Marton Sagi and is available in Marketplace and can be deployed in Visual Studio Environment.

If you are new to AL Programming or VS Code Editor, two things you will understand from this article -

1. You can build an extension for AL programming.
2. How this Extension will help all developers.

Discussion About Dinosaur Developer-

We have developers and consultant around the globe with a different experience. I was reading a few discussion which was discussing dinosaur developers and how this change is hard for those developers. I don't agree to any of those discussions and none of our NAV / CAL experts will ever become obsolete at least with this change.

I think this move is from CAL to AL will have the same impact as we had with NAV 2013 (or 2009) where RTC was launched. If you are ready to unlearn the old way and Learn the New way, you will never be a dinosaur developer and will always remain on top of all changes.

I was discussing this with my colleague Jon Long, and with these articles about dinosaur I assumed he will be a dinosaur developer but guess what after so much experience in CAL / NAV he unlearned old way and passionate about learning what's New and always remain on Top of what's new coming in the product. This is what it takes not to be a dinosaur developer. 

How AL Object Designer will Help?

AL is more about files instead of objects. As extension grows there will be more and more files day by day and it becomes confusing to developers.

Developers and Consultants who are thinking that they are the dinosaur, this extension will give them a ladder for moving toward future with some glimpse of past. It will make things easy for those developers to still see things in the older way but do coding in AL.

This Extension will also help recent hires/freshers in product who witnessed this change during there job and were worried about this change.

This Extension will also be handy for developers who are ready to jump into the future and having troubles in finding the missing pieces and have to go back to Developer environment to check objects and Events during coding.

One Command in Extension -  AL Object Designer.

Main Features - 

• List Overview of all AL objects in your project: based on symbols (*.app) and your local .al files.
• List Events from symbol objects, browse them in the same way as objects.
• Live Update: object list is automatically maintained as you create/change/delete objects or download symbols.
• Multi-Folder workspaces are supported: e.g. a workspace with MainApp/TestApp folders.
• Object Search: filter by Object Type, Name or ID.
• Event Search: filter by Object Type, Name, ID or Event Name.
• Copy/Paste Events: copy event subscription definition to the clipboard by clicking on Event Name.
• Object/Event Name filtering: works with partial matches as well. Just like the Windows RTC Client's search field.
• Run selected objects.
• Run table/page extentions.
• View definition of Symbols: original file is opened for local files.
• Generate new objects from tables: card/list pages, report, query.
• Built-in snippets: generate a new dictionary or entry tables using a single click.
• Custom snippets: use your own snippets placed in <project root>/.altemplates folder
• Design view for Pages (alpha): card/list layout is rendered for local pages. Card/Document Symbols are also supported.

Pre-Requisites - 

• 'Run Object' function is based on commands from CRS AL Language Extension. by Waldo.

Sources - 

• Linked In Post By Author.

• Visual Studio Market Place.

Contribute -

 

If you have suggestions or would like to add features to this extension, you can do that by using Github. Pull the release, do mods and Request Author to add those in extension.

Github Link.

Thanks to Marton Sagi for this great extension which will help all developers.

Stay connected.

Regards,
Saurav Dhyani
www.sauravdhyani.com