Have you started on NAV Extensions?

Business Central/NAV Developers Forum
1

Well I’m sure no Dynamics NAV developer has not heard the news. Soon we are going to have a new development environment and its going to be “extensions only”!

Extensions have been around for almost a year now. But how many of you have started working with Extensions?

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Please share this thread with any other NAV developer you know.

Gem

2

Great poll Erik! Soon enough it will be extensions only, on which I wrote a blog last month. Implementing extension in NAV. I hope developers find it useful. :slight_smile: ishwar-nav.blogspot.com/…/implement-extensions-in-nav.html

3

I almost have more that 10 extensions ready for NAV 2016. I am not sure how it will impact NAV because i have so many questions about Extensions.

That Being Said I am eagerly waiting for NAV 2017 GA, My Hopes are so high w.r.t Extension in NAV 2017.

4

Very good [mention:0029817b2982417b88a4bd8cd0f5c58e:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05]. Can you give some examples of what you’ve done with Extensions? And how has the experience been?

5

first limitation I found is we cant use currpage.update etc functions…

6

In my eyes then the extension in the NAV 2016 release was basically just a “preview”. The project I’m currently on have decided to start the development on NAV 2017, and here it really becomes useful.

7

I suggest to use extensions only for cloud environments
we can use events for onpremise versions…

8

Why only for cloud? We are working on a large multi-country project, technically on-premise.
But I wouldn’t use it, if it was not going to be a multi-tenant setup. By having each country as tenant, then we can apply “changes” individually, without changing our baseapp.

And yes, not having access to currPage.UPDATE is a bummer! Kind of also makes page events a lot less use full, that you really cannot access the actual page.

NAV 2017 Extensions really have become much better. Love the “translation” option.

9

it also depends upon requirements of onpremise.
it will kill the transparency of the system. it will be a hell to the others to know what is in system.

10

I found another thing which could be a limitation for consultants providing support.

If new fields are added in tables and packaged in an extension. And lets say we get a request from client that they need to update the data in this field (which happens at times in support projects) then if you try to update this field using a processing only report, you will not be able to do it.

Declaring a record variable of a table will not be showing the fields which exist in the extension. It will only show fields existing in the development environment.

Maybe, we have to use SQL in future for such tasks. Please educate/correct me if am not correct in my statement.

11

this is what I called transparency and easy of access.
NAV is known to be for its flexibility which we will loose with extensions.

12

Exactly. Flexibility is the most admired feature of NAV industry wide.

Let’s hope that these limitations do not exist in NAV 2017!