From the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV Blogs: Symbols; Test codeunits; Power BI; Outbound HTTP calls

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

• Symbols of madness
• Do you include test codeunits with your Business Central extensions?
• Editing Power BI reports in Business Central
• Outbound HTTP calls blocked in Business Central sandbox

Symbols of madness

On his Red and Bundle blog, Rene Brummel stated that recently he was stumped by an issue he ran into – his symbols weren't loading.

He explained that he typically develops extensions on a standard Microsoft NAV 2018 database and occasionally has to add functions or parameters that have been requested through Microsoft's GitHub.

Then he has to load symbols, which he creates automatically using the finsql command line switch generatesymbolreference=yes. His mistake was thinking that it always works.

So what had happened? I had updated my local NAV2018 to CU 9 a while ago. No problems there, just some bug fixes I needed for another extension. But when I added my C/Side function on my NAV2018 CU6 test server my symbols would not load.

You can find out what happened and what to do here.

Do you include test codeunits with your Business Central extensions?

On his Views on Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV blog, Erik Ernst noted that running Dynamics 365 Business Central in the cloud, means you're always running the latest version because Microsoft upgrades the standard code and any installed extensions.

Before upgrading and upon any new build Business Central is being tested by running 10,000s of automated tests in the test toolkit. This test is done every time they build their code, and it checks that the functionality in BC works as it is designed to work.

Ernst pointed out that while there are requirements for apps built for AppSource, there are no formal requirements for apps that aren't built for AppSource when it comes to test codeunits.

In his blog post, Ernst explained why you should care about this and then discussed how to create automated tests. You can find out how to do it here.

Editing Power BI reports in Business Central

On the Totovic NAV Blog, Aleksandar Totovic noted that in the Fall '18 release of Business Central, Microsoft has already added Power BI reports on all the appropriate pages. That saves time because you don't have to add the reports page-by-page.

If you don't like the way the reports look, you don't have to leave your Business Central cloud environment because now you can edit the reports in D365BC.

In his blog post, Totovic offered step-by-step instructions for editing Power BI in Business Central. You can find out what they are here.

Outbound HTTP calls blocked in Business Central sandbox

On his Kauffmann@Dynamics 365 Business Central blog, Arend-Jan Kauffmann noted that he had received a number of questions from people who had encountered an error message when they were installing the self-monetization example code he created about a year ago.

The error message was: Callback functions are not allowed.

Apparently it came about because HTTP calls are blocked by default in the sandbox.

This error happened because there is code in the install codeunit to do an outgoing HTTP call to a web service. In the same period, people started to report that the sandbox environment showed a popup when they triggered an outgoing HTTP call from code.

In his blog post, Kauffmann explained the reason for the popup. Microsoft has enabled users to create an online sandbox that contains a copy of the production data, including all settings. Because of this, there has to be a way to stop unintentional outgoing web service calls.

You can read more about this issue here.