Tailor, extend, and build applications
You can tailor, extend, and build applications so that Business Central fits your specific needs, with little to no code development. With Business Central, you can:
Investigate whether third-party solutions are available that will fit your requirements.
Check if Microsoft Power Platform allows you to fill in the gaps.
Customize and develop additional functionality yourself.
Personalization
Users can personalize a workspace to suit their own preferences by changing pages to display only the information that they need. The personalization changes that specific users make will only affect what they see, not what other users see.
Administrators can control and manage personalization by:
Enabling or disabling the personalization feature for users of a specific profile.
Clearing any page personalizations that users have made.
In addition to what users can personalize, administrators and super users can override users' personalization and define which features are accessible in all or specific companies.
AppSource
Dynamics 365 Business Central exposes many ready-to-use apps in AppSource, the marketplace for business solutions.
AppSource is a marketplace where partners can provide marketing details, such as descriptions, whitepapers, or videos about their app for Business Central.
Embed App partners can decide to promote themselves and their Embed App on AppSource.
In AppSource, you can find apps to add simple features to your Business Central app, like barcode generators.
You can also find apps that add new business functionality to your Business Central app, like apps for web shop integration, product configurators, document scanning, and so on. Other than application apps, you can also find consulting resources in Business Central AppSource.
Many business users are looking for experienced partners to help them get started with confidence by offering quality consulting services designed to deliver predictable outcomes. Implementation partners therefore can play a vital role in helping customers to both assess their needs and evaluate and deploy the right solutions that can help them meet their business goals. For this reason, AppSource supports the listing of consulting services offerings from System Integrator (SI) partners of Microsoft. The goal is to enable business users to connect swiftly with any expert services they need.
AppSource consulting services offerings are customer-specific engagements that have a defined outcome, are fixed in scope and duration, and have a fixed price or are free. Business users can request to be contacted by partners in a friction-free manner. Partners receive a notification in their CRM systems and most aim to respond to users within 48 hours after being contacted.
Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft is modernizing business processes across productivity with Business Central and Microsoft Power Platform. Microsoft Power Platform includes Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate. Power Apps allows you to create apps for businesses with little to no code development. A powerful, point-and-click approach to app building makes it simple for anyone who is familiar with Microsoft 365 to customize and extend Business Central and build a new category of apps.
Power Apps
With Microsoft Power Apps, you can build visually stunning apps that take advantage of device capabilities like cameras, GPS, and pen controls. You can also build apps that run on any device and are customized for your business requirements. You can accomplish all these tasks without writing a single line of code.
You can make your Business Central data available as a data source in Power Apps because Business Central is an available connection in Power Apps.
Power Automate
Power Automate provides you with automated workflows that connect to more than 200 services out of the box. You can create flows for common business scenarios by using a rich template gallery, and then customize them to meet your needs through an intuitive graphical editor. You can also start from the beginning by using the same editing experience and build complex flows that include parallel branching, conditional logic, and loops.
With the Dynamics 365 Business Central connector, you can use your Business Central data as part of a workflow in Power Automate. You'll also find a growing quantity of Business Central templates for Power Automate with preconfigured flows for Business Central.
Power Automate is the connective component that's used by end users and app developers alike for digital transformation, no matter what application they are using.
Note
In addition to Power Automate, you can use the workflow functionality within Business Central. Though they are two separate workflow systems, any flow template that you create with Power Automate is added to the list of workflow templates within Business Central.
Customization
Developers can add and extend existing code by creating extensions. The development environment that is used to create extensions is Visual Studio Code.
Extensions
Functionality in Business Central is coded in objects. To modify existing objects, such as tables, pages, and so on, you must create extensions. Extensions are a programming model that is object-based. You can create new objects or extend existing objects, depending on what you want your extension to do. An extension defines extra functionality to modify the behavior of the Business Central application.
All objects are stored as code, which is known as Application Language-code, or AL-code. Every object is saved in files with the .al file extension, and you can put multiple objects in a single .al file, although it's recommended that you use a single file for each object.
When your extension is compiled, you'll get an .app package file, which can be deployed to the Business Central server. You can submit your extension package to AppSource, where you can offer your solution to customers worldwide.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code shouldn't be confused with the Visual Studio code editor, which is used for creating, building, and deploying large Microsoft .NET solutions.
Visual Studio Code can be installed on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Download Visual Studio Code by selecting this link.
With Visual Studio Code, you can write AL-code to create extensions for Business Central. AL is the language that is used to create and access objects, writing logic, and so on. Extensions in Visual Studio Code are small packages that are created to extend the standard functionality. By default, Visual Studio Code knows a few basic programming and markup languages like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and NodeJS.
AL language extension for Visual Studio Code
If you want to use Visual Studio Code for other languages, you can install extra packages, also called Extensions. Microsoft created an extension for AL so that by installing this extension, you can use Visual Studio Code for developing Business Central solutions. By using the AL language extension for Visual Studio Code, you'll get the benefits of a modern development environment along with seamless publishing, debugging, and execution integration with Business Central.
Application Language
Application Language (AL) is a programming language that is used to write code for Business Central. With Application Language, you can manipulate data. The statements and functions will allow you to read, write, and change data. It will also allow you to control the implementation of objects and to interact with the user. Application Language contains a set of predefined functions that you can use when writing code, but you can also develop custom functions.
You can have Event triggers or Function triggers. Every object type in Application Language (Table, Page, CodeUnit, Report, and so on) has event triggers. Event trigger names start with On, for example OnInsert, OnModify, OnDelete, and so on. The event triggers occur when an event takes place. Which triggers are available depends on the type of object.
You can also write your own custom functions in an object, and these custom functions will be accessible in the object by function triggers, which are referred to as procedures. Just like in every programming language, Application Language (AL) enables you to create variables that you can use in your functions to calculate or store temporary data.