Better InStream support

Enabled for Public preview General availability
Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically Mar 1, 2023 Apr 1, 2023

Business value

When working with stream objects, AL developers can get the size of the stream object without having to convert it to a blob. Removing the conversion to a blob makes their code run faster.

Feature details

Until this release, an AL developer who needed to know the size of an InStream object had to convert it to a blob and then ask for the size. This caused unwanted resource consumption on the server because it had to allocate memory to the blob object (that is likely just thrown away after asking for the size of it).

In this release, we added two new properties to the InStream datatype:

  • Length: Returns the length in bytes of the stream.
  • Position: Returns the position within the current stream.

See also

InStream Data Type (docs)