Tips & Tricks: Going full screen with control add-ins in BC150
Long time no see here, for I don't know which time. That's how it is these days, life kicks in, work kicks in, stuff kicks in, and then time flies…
Using Font Awesome icons in control add-ins
This post has been long overdue. I’ve had it in my to-do list for nearly four years now, but it always ended up in the not today category. Funny how many times I’ve implemented it already, and how many times I’ve presented this, and I never ever found a few minutes to create a demo repository and a blog to come with it. So, here we go.
Including web fonts in your control add-ins is no rocket science, really. Control add-ins are just pieces of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript running in an iframe, so whatever you can do within an iframe from anywhere else, you can do it from control add-ins. Web fonts are no different. The problems start if you want to package web fonts into the control add-in so that you can use them even when your BC/NAV instance is running in an isolated network, or if you simply want to eliminate any external dependencies.
Control add-ins support packaging script, stylesheet, and image files. This could make you think that you cannot include web fonts. But that would be wrong. If you read my blog post about abusing images to load HTML files, then it might give you some ideas. Yes, you can use the same trick to load web fonts or just about any other external resource.
Let’s take a look how to include a web font, and let’s use Font Awesome as an example. Because it’s just awesome.
Automating control add-in development using gulp
Happy new year everyone! Last year was a bit slow for me, until the very end, when I churned out a year’s worth of posts just in two days. I hope this year to be a bit different, and let me kick-start it with a concept I’ve been playing with recently.
If you are into control add-ins development, chances are you’re familiar with my Visual Studio Project Template for control add-ins. It’s cool because it allows you to deploy all of your changes all the way over to NAV just by pressing F6. But it sucks because it’s based on Visual Studio, which is so… not 2019. It’s true, Microsoft never prescribed exactly which tool you should use to build your control add-ins once you’ve created the interface. It was entirely up to you. For me, Visual Studio used to be the tool of choice because in there you create the interface, and then why not just create everything in there.
But recently, I thought – why not using VS Code to develop control add-ins “v1” (that is: the control add-ins that work in pre-AL, pre-extensions “v2”, pre-NAV2018/BC environments)? If you, like me, still have to do those from time to time, but absolutely want to use VS Code instead of Visual Studio, then this post is for you.
Last month, I’ve decided to port all development work on a major control add-in from Visual Studio into VS Code. When I say “major”, I mean it: it’s 16K lines of JavaScript code in 138 source code files, not including 3rd party libraries. To automate that in Visual Studio, I used a hodge-podge of build tasks, Windows batch scripts, PowerShell scripts, external utilities for zipping and minification, and the first thing I did – stupid, I know – when I transferred all my work to VS Code was to automate all of my tasks exactly the same way. So, I took all the same batch scripts, configured them as VS Code tasks, and I was happy. Not. It was slow, and ugly.
And then I remembered gulp.
It’s funny, gulp should have been the first thing to cross my mind. But, while I knew it was there, I never did anything with it. But, how complicated can it be? It turned out, I was able to replace all of the automation I had earlier into one nice gulpfile.js and turn my entire development experience completely upside-down. It’s that good.
So, I decided to share a little bit of my learning path, lessons learned, hints, tips, tricks, and all else in a series of blog posts about how to automate control add-in development using gulp. This is the first post in the series of an unknown number of posts to follow up.
Disclaimer: this particular post is not a NAV 2018/BC/AL. This is (mostly) for pre-BC control add-in developers. However, a lot of gulp concepts I’ll talk about are readily applicable to AL and BC world.
NAV TechDays 2018 Demos: Keyboard Shortcut Listener
The last of the NAV TechDays 2018 demo series comes with a little story.
While Waldo and I were preparing the “Evolution of the Titan” session, on Sunday before the conference, we were brainstorming the ideas of what would constitute a cool non-visual JavaScript demo. I wanted to showcase the things that JavaScript can do for you in control add-in context, but a less obvious thing. Everyone is expecting to see some cool visual demos, but I wanted to point out the vast possibilities in the non-visual area. Then Waldo asked me: can you make it run an action on a keypress, like post a document on F9?
And that was it! An amazingly cool demo that shows how you can do really cool stuff that falls beyond the visual realm.
Okay, I’ll calm down a bit. Keyboard shortcuts? Seriously? Well, unfortunately, yes. In NAV/BC web client (universal client included) there are almost no keyboard shortcuts. Microsoft is working on some improvements here, but the important thing, allowing developers to bind specific keyboard shortcuts to specific actions, is still conspicuously missing from NAV/BC.
So, I did this demo.
NAV TechDays 2018 Demos: User Profile Picture
One of the more effective, and probably completely unexpected, demos at Waldo’s and mine NAV TechDays 2018
session was the user profile picture demo. I say “completely unexpected” is that it shows something that you normally don’t expect from control add-ins. When hearing “control add-in”, most developers (but also most Microsoft people) have in mind a visual control that visualizes some data from NAV/BC and possibly allows you to interact with (C/)AL through that piece of UI. However, there are many other things possible, like having a completely non-visual “controls” that tap into the functionality of the web client and extend its functionality beyond what it was originally designed to do.
One of these is the user profile picture.
If you didn’t attend (or watch) the session, this is what the demo is about: it makes use of the user silhouette icon in the upper-right corner (that actually doesn’t represent anything, just sits there) and allows you to take your selfie and then uses that selfie as your profile picture that’s showing there instead. Pretty neat and cool..
How did I do it?