Developing a Customized Solution for Dynamics 365 Business Central

In the previous chapter, we saw the fundamentals of extension development for Dynamics 365 Business Central and we analyzed all of the building blocks for creating extensions, such as events and basic objects definitions, and how to extend standard objects.

In this chapter, we'll put all of these concepts together and create a real-world extension for Dynamics 365 Business Central. These extensions will be created by using AppSource guidelines and best code practices.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Translating a business case into a real-world extension
• Understanding dependent extension

Translating a business case into a real-world extension

In this section, let's imagine having a Dynamics 365 Business Central customer with various business requirements. We want to create an extension to satisfy this customer's needs.

Our customer is a big commercial company that has adopted Dynamics 365 Business Central as the company's ERP and has various business requirements that require customization of the standard features to be satisfied.

The business requirements are as follows:

• Sales: These requirements include the following:
  • The company wants to classify customers based on custom categories that they can define as needed and that can change in the future. Each Customer Category must have its own details that can be used for some business processes.
  • The sales office must be able to create a default Customer Category and assign this default value...

Understanding a dependent extension

In the previous sections, we developed our extension and deployed it.

Imagine now that you've deployed this extension to a customer tenant and now the customer asks you for some customization:

• They want to add the Certification No. field to the Vendor Quality table.
• They want to change the gift assignment logic by always assigning a fixed gift quantity of 2.

To create a customization for your customer, you should never directly modify your standard extension code, but instead, you should create a new extension that will be dependent on your base extension.

To do this, we create a new extension project in Visual Studio Code called PacktDemoDependencyExtension. This new extension must be dependent on our previously created PacktDemoExtension; otherwise, we won't be able to see the objects defined in that extension.

First, we need...

Summary

In this chapter, we saw the implementation of a real-world extension for Dynamics 365 Business Central. We defined the backend of our solution (tables) and we created the pages (the user interface) and the required business logic (codeunits and events) according to the initial needs of the business. We saw how to make our code extensible by using the Handled pattern and how to create installation and upgrade code.

In the last part of this chapter, we created a new extension that modifies the standard behavior of our base extension, and we looked at the concept of dependency between extensions.

You have also learned how to create extensions with objects and events, how to use coding rules, and how to create customizations without modifying the base code of your application.

In the next chapter, we'll see how to handle some advanced topics with AL and the extension...