Tag: Basics

Leveraging TestField as Actionable Errors

Leveraging TestField as Actionable Errors

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

As a Business Central Developer, we know that the quickest and easiest way to check if a field has a value is to call the TestField method on a Record. When used, the system checks to see if the field is not zero or a blank string. If there is not a value, we are used to getting an error.

TestFields have gotten some love at the platform level to help users quickly solve data problems and continue in their processes. This blog post will walk you through the changes in system behavior, and how to tweak your code to maximize user efficiency.

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#HumpDayHacks a cat sitting at a desk in front of a camel standing on a football field

#HumpDayHacks – Avoiding Validation Chaos

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

Have you used the AZ AL Dev Tools New AL File Wizard to create objects? It’s probably as fast as my cats running into the kitchen when they hear the pantry door open.  Quick, efficient, and surprisingly satisfying.

But speed isn’t everything, especially when it comes to creating pages in AL for Business Central. If you’re not careful, that lightening-fast setup can lead to subtle issues that only show up later when your page doesn’t behave quite the way you expect. One of the most overlooked culprits? Field Order.

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Live Share - VS Code Pair Programming

Live Share – VSCode Pair Programming

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

As a developer, we oftentimes participate in code reviews where we are either sharing our screen, or viewing someone else’s code. How hard is it to identify where some code needs to be changed, or it’s hard to follow someone navigating through their code.

Perhaps you are rubber duck debugging, and your code still isn’t making sense. That whole “it works in my Docker container, but not in the Sandbox”, and wouldn’t it be nice to debug WITH a co-worker? You can both set break points within the same code base, and debug within someone’s local Docker container.

Maybe you want to speed up development. One person is adding fields and pages, and someone else is adding some custom business logic, but it relies on those fields being created. We know that you need to add the related fields to the “sister tables” to the data flows through to all the related posted tables, but man, does that take some extra effort. You can share one person’s VS Code instance, and pair program!

If any of the above scenarios sound interesting to you, then you need to install the Live Share VS Code extension!

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