Hello World! My name is Bart, I'm a Technical Navision/Business Central Consultant at ESC Bvba in Belgium. This blog will be a technical blog about the AL language that Microsoft uses for their ERP platform Business Central.
To start this blog I would like to talk about AL Toolbox; a Visual Studio Code Extension that extends the AL Language Extension. You can find it here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=BartPermentier.al-toolbox.
What does this extension do you might ask? Well it doesn't do all that much to be honest, it just adds some snippets and oh yeah...Regions!
I believe most of you know if you want to fold everything in VSCode you can use the shortcut Ctrl+k, Ctrl+0. Now if you do this in a big codeunit you get something like this:
I didn't like this from day 1, so I started using comments and tabs to "structure" my code. The result looks something like this (not the same project):
At the time I was happy with the result although it took a lot of effort because you had to indent your functions to create groups and subgroups.
Then this post came along on gitHub and I immediately loved it: https://github.com/Microsoft/AL/issues/1007.
I immediately started using the solution that anzwdev proposed and the result was so much better, no more indentations needed just simple region tags!
The only downside was that everytime there was an update of AL language or you had to swap to another version you had to implement it again...
So that's why I created this extension so that I wouldn't have to do it manually anymore and I could share it with colleagues.
The result:
Next: AL-Toolbox snippets explained.