AL Object ID Ninja Scheduled Maintenance Announcement: October 9 at 19:00 CET
For all of you using AL Object ID Ninja, please read this post. There will be scheduled maintenance of AL Object ID Ninja back end on October 9, 2021, at…
Important Announcement for AL Object ID Ninja
If you are using AL Object ID Ninja already then you may want to read this post. If not, then first install AL Object ID Ninja, then read this post 😀
Since its launch three weeks ago, this extension has exploded far beyond my expectations. As of this morning, Ninja has been installed 5.916 times, there are 2.047 Business Central apps that use Ninja to assign object IDs, and there are currently around 13.37 million blob read and write operations per week performed on my Azure Storage and around 6.75 million Azure Function calls per day. These numbers nearly doubled in the past ten days, and while there is a definite cap to how far this can grow, I expect all of this to grow at a steady rate for the foreseeable future.
Which brings me to the important part. AL Object ID Ninja is free, and it will stay free. Right now there is absolutely no fear of it even remotely approaching the limit I’ve set (at the moment, Ninja is costing on average €1 per day against my €125 monthly allowance that comes with my Visual Studio subscription, so there is aaaaaa lot of room to grow. However, since Ninja grew beyond my wildest dreams already, and since I know it’s far from hitting the roof any time soon, if nothing changes, in a couple of months it could hit a €3 per day threshold that would make me pretty uncomfortable.
That said, I have been working on some important back-end improvements to keep costs (much) lower while providing even more functionality. The reason why I went there wasn’t costs at all – it was actually some new functionality I wanted to add that I realized would drive costs a bit up, so I had to do something.
All of this is to finally announce this important announcement: at some point during the weekend, there will be a major upgrade to the AL Object ID Ninja back end, and over the course of the next week there will be two new versions of AL Object ID Ninja extension. The old extension will not work with new back end, and new extension will not work with old back end.
That’s it. If you care about nitty-gritty details, then read on.
(more…)AL Object ID Ninja v1.2.0 – plus some Azure lessons learned
First things first. Yesterday evening, I’ve released AL Object ID Ninja v1.2.0 and there is really nothing new that you’d care about, functionally speaking. Check the changelog if you will, but trust me, you won’t be really blown away. But yes, unfortunately, it did merit a full minor version rather than just a patch number increase.
That’s it. If you only care about what’s new, then this is where you stop reading. But if you care to know what kind of a rocky ride I’ve had yesterday wrestling with Azure and fighting like mad to keep this service free, then read on.
I won this fight, by the way 😎
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AL Object ID Ninja v1.1.0 released
I have just released version 1.1.0 of AL Object ID Ninja. Here’s what’s new.
Merge synchronization
In previous versions, you could only synchronize full information. This type of synchronization simply recorded in the back end whatever it finds in the front end. For example, if the back end had object IDs 50100..50105, and the front end only has object IDs 50104..50106, then the full synchronization, will drop whatever was recorded previously, and will replace it with 50104..50106.
This type of synchronization may be good enough for teams who are only just starting development in AL, and have no existing repos. They can just start assigning numbers, and then synchronize later as needed.
However, if you are an active team with dozens of developers working in different branches, and you start using AL Object ID Ninja after objects already exist in your repo, if you only run synchronization from master branch, then any of object IDs already assigned in those other development branches will not be visible to AL Object ID Ninja. Instead of preventing object ID collision, AL Object ID Ninja would lead you right into it in this case.
For all these scenarios, you have Update synchronization.
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AL Object ID Ninja
If it does what the documentation says it does, I can only say: “Build this man a statue!” Awesome job.
— Waldemar Brakowski (@wbrakowski365) September 11, 2021
One of the biggest obstacles to AL team development (is there any other kind?) is object IDs. IDs are supposed to be easy: just pick the next free one and off you go. AL Language even helps by suggesting the next available one through IntelliSense. But you are most likely not the only developer on your team. As soon as you add another developer to equation, and both of you use the built-in AL IntelliSense auto-suggest feature, you are inevitably heading towards object ID collision. The more developers there are, the more active your repository is, the more likely the collision.
Obviously, without some kind of a back-end that coordinates object ID assignment – preferably in real time – is absolutely necessary. And teams have come up with various solutions to this problem. They include:
- “Who cares!”: the most heroic one, no object ID collision will ruin your day. Bring it on – you say! I’ll handle you – you say! These teams spend a lot of time resolving collisions post-factum.
- Object “reservations”: you create an empty object of the desired type, push just that, create a PR that does nothing by that, and launch into the Hail Mary mode until your PR gets merged. The slower your validation pipeline is, the more likely it is that more than one developer will be saying their Hail Marys at the same time, and guess what – Mary will help one of them.
- “Hey, folks”: you yell to announce to everyone that you are about to take an object ID. Or, in more advanced teams, you run a Teams team (uh, did I mention “team?”). This approach is not too robust, but generally yields better results than the above two.
- Excel: the ways this tool gets used, geez. It’s a spreadsheet calculator, for Pete’s sake, but people have been using it for everything ranging from shopping lists to, well, object ID assignment sheets.
- “When you have a hammer, every problem you see is a…” BC! The ways this tool gets used, too! Well, heck, yeah, isn’t it so freaking obvious that people will just create a BC app and deploy it internally so that everyone can use it. BC has nearly all facilities you need (that none of the above approaches does): primary key validation and concurrency. This is a very advanced stage in the evolution of object ID collision management solutions.
- Automation. Yeah, baby! Now that there is a BC back end, and BC has APIs, let’s build an API that gives you next number, and then let’s do some front-end that fetches that from the back end, and then let’s somehow embed into VS Code. There is at least one tool that I know of, that does exactly this. And good that I didn’t know of it that Saturday morning nine days ago, because I would have zero motivation to take this evolution one big step further.
This is where AL Object ID Ninja joins the show! It’s zero-configuration, crazy-fast, mind-bogglingly simple solution for no-collision object ID assignment in AL. If you haven’t already (and if you are using Waldo’s AL Extension Pack, chances are you already have) go fetch yourself a copy.
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