From the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV Blogs: APIs; Extensions V2; Schema changes; Cue tiles

This week on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central-NAV blog roundup:

• Getting started with Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs
• Is the future of NAV extensions V2?
• Dynamics 365 Business Central: Handling breaking schema changes on production
• How to create cue tiles for fetching pending approvals in a workflow in NAV?

Getting started with Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs

On TharangaC's blog, Tharanga Chandrasekara first explained exactly what an application programming interface (API) is: An interface that enables applications to talk with each other.

He then stated that last spring, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central introduced many "ready-to-use" APIs that enable seamless integration between other service offerings and D365BC. And the number of these particular APIs is growing every month.

Chandrasekara stated that in addition to the ready to use APIs, users could also build their own custom APIs, something that he said he will discuss in a future post.

In this blog post, Chandrasekara outlines the basic API requests and shows how you can use Postman to test them.

You can learn about them here.

Is the future of NAV extensions V2?

On KSD Consultancy's Technical Tips & Tricks for Dynamics NAV, Ashwini Tripathi discussed the history of extensions, which were first introduced when Dynamics NAV 2016 was rolled out.

This introduced the concept of writing code isolated from the core objects and use events to interact with the standard codes. Now create the extension that can be installed or uninstalled any time without affecting the original base layer of the product.

Microsoft called this extension V1, which were also developed using C/AL and deployed using PowerShell. Then when NAV 2018 was released last year, Microsoft rolled out the second generation of extensions, extensions V2, which introduced a completely new development platform and a new AL language, an evolution of C/AL.

Tripathi pointed out that beginning in 2020, this will likely be the only development platform available.

You can read about what Tripathi stated is next for extensions here.

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Handling breaking schema changes on production

On Stefano Demiliani's blog, he stated that recently people on forums have been asking how to handle breaking scheme changes when they're working with extensions in D365BC.

He outlined the typical scenario that led to an error message:

ERROR: 'Unsupported table change' message or (for keys) the message is something like 'An unsupported key change was detected. Keys cannot be changed, removed, or reordered. New keys can only be added to the end of the list.'

Previously, there was a way to handle this, but now in the cloud environment things are different because extensions V2 don't support breaking schema changes across synchronized versions of the extension.

In his post, Demiliani explained how to "clean" your local sandbox environment as well as your production environment.

You can find out how here.

How to create cue tiles for fetching pending approvals in a workflow in NAV?

On Chris D'silva's Blog – Dynamics NAV and Business Central, D'silva explained that during an approval process, a designated person is responsible for approving the request. But when that person forgets to approve the request, certain processes may be delayed.

In his blog post, D'silva offered a way for the person who has to approve requests to do it  in Dynamics NAV.

What if I login into Dynamics NAV where I get the count of approvals pending for me to approve? Also on a click, if it navigate to Request to approve page where I can view the request, approve or reject it will be an added advantage.

You can find out how to accomplish this here.