Interop

Three Whys about .NET Interoperability

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Once upon a time, a smart bloke named Saikichi Toyoda came up with a 5 Whys troubleshooting technique. It postulates that you only need to ask “why” five times to get to the root cause of any problem in a cause-and-effect sequence.

However, with .NET Interoperability in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (pick your version here), I’ve only had to ask “why” three times today, and unfortunately I could not get to the root cause, except – poor design decisions.

It all has to do with a simple .NET class: System.DBNull. The first “why” is simple: why is there no support for fields on .NET types. The second “why” is even simpler: why don’t we have a null constant in C/AL. And the last “why” downright falls into the “what the heck” category: why did somebody think it was a smart idea to replace DBNull value with null.

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Detecting current object type and ID using some funky .NET Interop

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Did you ever need to identify the current object type and ID, programmatically, from within the object? For example, detecting the current table ID in a table trigger like this guy? Or current codeunit ID from inside the codeunit?

Why would you need something like this? If you are inside a trigger in, say, table 18, you do know that you are in the table 18, and you can refer to it as 18 or DATABASE::Customer, right? Yes, but this is hardcoding. If you move this code to a different table you’d have to change the hardcoded constant to whatever that other table is.

Microsoft was well aware of the need to know the currently running object ID in some cases, because there is the OBJECTID function to the CurrPage and CurrReport built-in objects. However, for tables, codeunits, XMLports, and queries, there is nothing of the sort.

Now, using .NET Interop, you can easily (well, easy is relative) get this info.

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Detect file encoding in C/AL using .NET Interop

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When importing files using XMLports, and especially when handling text files, file encoding is important. If the XMLport expects ASCII, and you feed it UTF-8, you may get scrambled data. If you have mismatching unicode input files, it may just fail altogether. Therefore, making sure that encoding is correct before you actually start gobbling input files might be important.

At least it was for me. I am currently automating data migration for a major go-live, and I am feeding some 30 input files to NAV, and I want to make sure they are all encoded correctly before I enter a process which would take another geological era to complete.

Detecting encoding is not something that pure C/AL can help you with, so I naturally went the .NET way. My position is that there is nothing a computer can do that .NET cannot. My another position is that there is no problem that I have that nobody before me ever had. Combining these two, we reach a yet another position of mine, that there is nothing that computer can do, of which there is no C# example, and typically I look for those on http://stackoverflow.com/

So, here’s the solution.

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A .NET Interoperability Lesson: Mapping indexed properties to C/AL

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Indexed properties are commonly used in C# because they allow a lot of syntactical flexibility, and make the code more readable, and easier to follow. Indexed properties are very similar to C/AL array indexing, except for two important differences:

  • In C/AL, indexer is always 1-based. In C#, indexers are 0-based.
  • In C/AL, indexer is always an integer. In C#, indexers can be any type.

These two examples show these differences:

image

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