Day: November 8, 2023

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The seventeenth of the new functionality in the Development section is Document your extensions with the ALDoc tool for partners.

Business Central has a large and continuously growing number of ISV apps on AppSource, some of which are being built upon, both by apps from the same publisher, other publishers and resellers (in the form of per-tenant extensions). To aid consuming apps downstream, documentation is a major benefit, but until now it has been a large manual process to create and keep that in sync with app changes, unless the publisher has invested in automation themselves.

Based on the recent investments for generated documentation for the Business Central base, system, and other first-party applications, Microsoft are giving publishers a new ALDoc tool. This allows generating documentation from symbolic and syntactical information, code comments, and overall application structure based on input .app files. Publishers can host the resulting documentation either internally—for example, for R&D usage—or externally for downstream partners.

Generating content based on source code has many advantages such as accuracy, 100 percent reflection of the current codebase, less error-prone documentation, and time savings.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Aug 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

It’s Microsoft’s pleasure to announce that with the latest prerelease update of the AL Language extension for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft have included a preview of the ALDoc tool for partners.

The ALDoc tool generates documentation from symbolic and syntactical information, code comments, and overall application structure based on input .app files. You can use it to generate internally or externally facing reference documentation for your solution.

The tool also generates a help site with the reference articles, sorted by the application structure, based on the provided custom template.

Read more about the tool in their docs Generating help with the ALDoc tool.

Also, as usual, Microsoft want to hear what you think. Use AL issues for tool feedback.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The sixteenth of the new functionality in the Development section is Use SecretText type to protect credentials and sensitive textual values from being revealed.

With an increasing amount of integrations to external systems, it’s not uncommon in AL code to work with secrets such as credentials and other sensitive textual values. Given the need to protect these from being revealed through debugging, the latter has often been blocked through resource exposure policies, at the cost of easy troubleshooting. To support enabling debugging, while protecting credentials and other sensitive textual values from being revealed, Microsoft are introducing a new SecretText type for variables. In addition, some of the common scenarios in the system app will get support for passing in SecretText parameters for credentials—for example, the HttpClient and Isolated Storage types.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically
Public Preview: Aug 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

A new type, SecretText, has been added to protect credentials and other sensitive textual values from being revealed through debugging. The declaration syntax will be similar to the Text data type, with the sole difference that it won’t support constraints on the length.

SecretText will be usable as a:

• Variable value
• Return value
• Parameter value

Its use will be limited to carrying, for example, credentials from the point of creation to the destination method. The destination method must accept a SecretText value.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2: Use SecretText Type to Protect Credentials and Sensitive Textual Values From Being Revealed”

When writing this post on warehouse receipts I came across an oddity when previewing the posting of the receipt.

If I created a warehouse receipt for an order, I can successfully preview the posting; if I created a new receipt for a second receipt and did a preview of the posting, the preview was successful. However, if I created one receipt with both orders, then I received the following error:

I was able to replicate this error with any warehouse receipt containing two or more receipts. I spent a while investigating before realising that the issue was only with the posting preview; if I actually tried to post the receipt then the posting was successful.

I discussed this with a couple of colleagues and we all agree that it is odd, but it appears to be a designed behaviour. The *** in quotes doesn’t show anywhere on the receipt, it just seems to be a set of characters which it uses as a placeholder and which causes the error.