Develop Your First Extension In Business Central

Business central is a popular ERP system developed by Microsoft for small and medium businesses. Although it is very rich, sometimes businesses need to extend some features using custom extensions.

Today we are going to learn how to set up your first extension in Business Central. The following things are what we are going to learn today:

1. Setup development environment
2. Installation of “Al Language”
3. Publish and Uninstall Package

Step 1

Visual Studio Code is required to develop extensions for Business Central. If you have already installed Visual Studio Code, that’s great. Otherwise, search on Google for “Visual Studio Code” and install it.

Open Visual Studio Code. You might know that the Business Central extension language is “AL language”. So, we need to install “AL Language” in Visual Studio Code before development.

Step 2 - Install “AL Language”

Open Visual Studio and search “AL Language” extension. Install it.

Follow the steps given above.

Step 3

To open Command Palette, press Ctrl + Shift + P, or you can directly open using menu bar “View > Command Palette”.

Then, select “Al: GO !”.

It selects a default path that is something like this in a textbox.

“C:\Users\User\Documents\AL\ALProject2”

You can change the path as you want, and then click ok.

After it asks for the targeted version of Business Central against which you want to use this extension, select the targeted version and then you can see a default project loaded in Visual Studio Code.

Step 4

On the start of the project, if you use command “Run >> Start debugging”, it asks for authentication. At the right side of the window you can see a code. Copy and then paste the code in the authentication window of your browser.

Copy the code and add as per the given image.

After clicking next. you will see this message in Visual Studio Code.

Step 5

Change the message in HelloWorld.ai and run the application. It will be published again with the modified version.

Step 6

Find your extension in Business Central.

In the top bar, click on the search icon and search for “Extension Management," as per the given image.

All extensions are listed there on extension management page.

Step 7

Delete Extension - Click on … of the extension box and you will get options to select. Select uninstall from list.

Summary

We learned about how to create first extension in business central using simple steps.

1. Installation of editor “Visual Studio Code”.
2. Installation of “Al Language”.
3. Authentication using Cloud based Business Central.
4. Modify code and publish packages.
5. Delete installed package.

I hope this article will give a clear picture of how you can create your first extension in Business Central and manage it.

Thanks for reading and happy learning.