DEV Community: Xavier Garonnat

What is the weight of my custom apps...

Xavier Garonnat — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 14:16:27 +0000

Question (from one of our customer): what is the weight of our custom/PTE apps compared to the standard/base app.

Let's download the base app objects and script some powershell to get some quick insight :

Download script here

Splitting Warehouse Shipment lines in multiple headers in Business Central

Xavier Garonnat — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 15:27:43 +0000

AL extensibility challenge : how to spread automatically Warehouse Shipment Lines on multiple Warehouse Shipment Header without being too much intrusive ? (with the constraint that the count of lines per document should now exceed a fixed value)

Just find the right event in the "Get Source Document" report and force the creation of a new header by setting WhseHeaderCreated to false when the condition is met :-)

    [EventSubscriber(ObjectType::Report, Report::"Get Source Documents", 'OnSalesLineOnAfterGetRecordOnBeforeCreateShptHeader', '', false, false)]
    local procedure OnSalesLineOnAfterGetRecordOnBeforeCreateShptHeader(SalesLine: Record "Sales Line"; var WarehouseRequest: Record "Warehouse Request"; var WarehouseShipmentHeader: Record "Warehouse Shipment Header"; var WhseHeaderCreated: Boolean; var OneHeaderCreated: Boolean; var IsHandled: Boolean);
    var
        WhseShipmentLine: Record "Warehouse Shipment Line";
    begin

        IF WarehouseShipmentHeader."No." = '' then
            exit;

        WhseShipmentLine.Reset();
        WhseShipmentLine.SetRange("No.", WarehouseShipmentHeader."No.");
        if WhseShipmentLine.Count = <MaxLinePerDocument> then
            WhseHeaderCreated := false; //create new Whse Shipment Header

    end;

I like simplicity :-)

Edit : the event is located here

Monitoring Business Central performance with Azure Troubleshootings Guide (preview)

Xavier Garonnat — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 10:13:02 +0000

To analyze performances issues in Business Central, top entry points are for sure Telemetry and Troubleshooting Guides delivered as Jupyter Notebooks.

Jupyter Notebooks are provided as .ipynb files (Performance-overview-TSG.ipynb for example) : these files requires Azure Data Studio, kqlmagic library, etc. (with state of the art .ini configuration files :-)

I'm not a big fan of using desktop resources to analyze performance of SaaS environments... so I jumped into online Troubleshooting Guides. This feature is still in preview but quite stable honestly.

The feature is available in the Azure Application Insight resource and fully replace Jupyter Notebooks as you can aggregate KQL queries in a very similar way.

So we went to "copy/paste" existing KQL queries from Jupyter notebooks/samples into a single online Troubleshooting Guide, most of them regarding performance like Long Running queries (RT0005), Database locks (RT0012), AL Performance (RT0018)...

Apart that it's an online feature (with by-design benefits), we liked the ability to consolidate Tenant ID/environments and the usage of Parameters block to filter events on Tenant ID, environment, company, client type, object type/ID, ...

You can obviously mix graphics and data parts, and all data can be downloaded in raw files in case of.

On top of this, it's very easy to deploy as the Troubleshooting guide is a single JSON file that you import into any Azure Tenant/Application Insight resource...

Using PowerShell Class to generate JSON for Batch Call API with Business Central

Xavier Garonnat — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 16:16:11 +0000

In this first article, I will showcase how to use PowerShell Class to easily create JSON document for Business Central API.

This sample was designed to do massive insert of Sales Invoice by lot of 100 using Batch Call : see this excellent article for more details about API Batch Call.

The "trick" is to use PowerShell Class and (nested) Arrays to generate the right JSON document.

We will start by designing Sales Invoice and Sales Invoice Line in a very simple way (using [] for Array definition to store multiple lines).

Theses classes are intended to be used with Sales Invoice API and Sales Invoice Line API.

class SalesInvoiceClasss
{
    [string] $customerId 
    [SalesInvoiceLineClass[]] $salesInvoiceLines

    [void]addLine([SalesInvoiceLineClass]$SalesInvoiceLine) 
    {
        $this.salesInvoiceLines += $SalesInvoiceLine
    }
}

class SalesInvoiceLineClass
{
    [string] $accountId 
    [decimal] $quantity  
    [decimal] $unitPrice     
}

To use Batch Call we need to POST requests. We will define classes to manage the list of request.

class ListOfRequestClass
{
    [RequestClass[]] $requests

    [void]addRequest([RequestClass]$request) 
    {
        $this.requests += $request
    }
}

class RequestClass
{
    [string] $method = "POST"
    [string] $id  = ""
    [string] $url = ""
    [ContentTypeClass] $headers     
    [SalesInvoiceClass] $body    
}

Please note the AddLine()/AddRequest() method to manage the corresponding collections inside each class and the default "POST" value.

We need one last (utility) class to have a default value in the header :

class ContentTypeClass {
    [string] ${Content-Type} = "application/json"
}

Now we can instantiate objects to create an invoice with two lines :

# Init a new Sales Invoice line
$salesInvoiceLine1 = New-Object SalesInvoiceLineClass
$salesInvoiceLine1.accountid = "$accountid"
$salesInvoiceLine1.quantity = 1
$salesInvoiceLine1.unitPrice = 10

# Init a new Sales Invoice line
$salesInvoiceLine2 = New-Object SalesInvoiceLineClass
$salesInvoiceLine2.accountid = "$accountid"
$salesInvoiceLine2.quantity = 2
$salesInvoiceLine2.unitPrice = 15

# Init a new Sales Invoice 
$salesInvoice = New-Object SalesInvoiceClass
$salesInvoice.customerId = "$customerid"
$salesInvoice.addLine($salesInvoiceLine1)
$salesInvoice.addLine($salesInvoiceLine2)

The corresponding JSON using command $salesInvoice | ConvertTo-Json is :

{
    "customerId":  "4636f8d6-c141-ec11-bb7b-000d3a256200",
    "salesInvoiceLines":  [
                              {
                                  "accountId":  "2236f8d6-c141-ec11-bb7b-000d3a256200",
                                  "quantity":  1,
                                  "unitPrice":  10
                              },
                              {
                                  "accountId":  "2236f8d6-c141-ec11-bb7b-000d3a256200",
                                  "quantity":  2,
                                  "unitPrice":  15
                              }
                          ]
}

We can now build a list of request containing 100 invoices (using the Invoice in the body request):

$listofrequest = New-Object ListOfRequestClass

$numberOfInvoices = 100
for($i = 0; $i -lt $numberOfInvoices ; $i++) 
{
    # Init a new request
    $request = New-Object RequestClass
    $request.id = $i
    $request.url = "companies($companyid)/salesInvoices" 
    $request.headers = $ContentType
    $request.body = $salesInvoice

    $listofrequest.addRequest($request)
}

Please find the result here : a full JSON document that can be used with your batch API URL to create 100 invoices in one call.

Enjoy !