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#08 DYNAMICS 365 BUSINESS CENTRAL 2021 WAVE 2 RELEASE (A.K.A. BC19)

Microsoft released, earlier this month of October, the new version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (version 19). Development, performance and web client are in continuous improvement and this version is not an exception.

Below are some of the most interesting features made available with this new version of D365 Business Central.

 

Application Improvements

  • Default line type in the sales and purchase documents – It is now possible to set a default line type for purchase and sales documents. If a company only deals with Items or G/L Accounts you can set this type in the Sales or Purchase Setup and there will be some time saved when creating documents.
  • Posting Preview can now show G/L and VAT entries in hierarchical view and is easily extensible – There is a new field in the General Ledger Setup to customize the view of Posting Preview. It is now possible to show a detailed view of the entries to post.
  • Add additional columns through personalization in various pages to gain more insight – To avoid the creation of more page extensions, Microsoft added much more fields to pages to allow more personalization by dragging fields or columns to the specified page.
  • Send mail from entities using Word templates as body or attachment – From this version users can now send e-mails from an entity card (Customer, Vendor, etc.) to the entity using word templates. The e-mail sent is logged so users can keep track of the communication maintained with the entity.
  • Remove obsolete reports 204, 205, 206, and 207 – Reports 204, 205, 206 and 207 were removed. The recommended reports are now, respectively, 1304, 1305, 1306 and 1307 which are easier to customize and faster to generate due to being based in Microsoft Word layouts.

 

Technical Improvements

  • Extend general ledger posting aggregations (Invoice Post. Buffer refactoring) – There is a new implementation for posting documents without using the Invoice Post. Buffer table. Because primary keys are not extensible there was a limitation when it was necessary to aggregate entries in a different way than the standard. The new implementation now uses an Interface object that can be implemented by developers allowing to aggregate entries in a customized way.
  • Error dialogs with detailed messages for better troubleshooting – Every error message in the application now have a detailed view. This detailed view allows users to copy technical details to the clipboard and send to the troubleshooter. The detailed view can include: Detailed error description, session id and AL call stack.
  • Collectable errors in AL – AL Code can now be written to throw more than one error. This functionality is useful when the user needs to be presented with a list of things to fix.
  • AL compiler diagnostic messages includes URLs – An URL is now included in the diagnostic messages generated by the AL Compiler to help the developers on how to resolve.
  • AL access to viewing and sharing files in OneDrive – It is now possible to open files directly from Business Central using OneDrive. The action starts in Business Central copying the file to OneDrive that will use native web applications to open the file (for example Excel, Word or PowerPoint). Later, in this wave, will be made available a Share action so users can directly share OneDrive files with others.
  • Profiling AL performance with snapshot debugger – Snapshot captures now allow to analyze code performance execution. When browsing a snapshot capture, VS Code together with AL Language extension will show a profiler with a pie chart with the time spent on execution.
  • Partial records on list pages and TableRelation lookup pages – Partial records are now used in list and TableRelation lookup pages making this type of pages loading much faster.
  • Componentization of Image module – A new Image module, deprecating the DotNetImage wrapper. This new module additionally allows to crop and resize images.
  • ShowMyCode replaced by resourceExposurePolicy properties – ShowMyCode property in app.json will be deprecated in a future release and has now been replaced with resourceExposurePolicy that specifies the following list of options: allowDebugging, allowDownloadingSource, and includeSourceInSymbolFile. This is a major improvement regarding Intellectual Property (IP) protection.

 

 See the full list of what’s new and planned for Business Central in the link below:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2021wave2/smb/dynamics365-business-central/planned-features