Work with Rapid Application Development
Working with Visual Studio Code and Business Central gives you the benefit of using Rapid Application Development (RAD) on large code projects. RAD allows faster development on projects with many files by doing a delta compilation and publishing only those application objects that have changed during development in Visual Studio Code. RAD publishing is an interim state and doesn't replace a full publish.
The files that have been changed by the application developer within Visual Studio Code are contained in a special RAD (.rad) file during builds. This file is saved in the .vscode folder of the AL project.
RAD changes are the changes of application objects within a RAD session. Only application objects, page customization objects, and profile objects are handled for RAD. RAD changes won't be persisted during save, only during build, publish, and debug.
A RAD published file won't contain the following files that are normally packaged during regular publishing:
Translation files
Permission files
Custom word and report RDL layout files
Table data
Web service definitions
These files will need to be regenerated with full publishing (Ctrl+F5). A RAD file will be deleted because of a successful publishing.
To start with RAD publishing, you can use two shortcuts:
Ctrl+Alt+F5 - Starts RAD publishing without debugging
Alt+F5 - Starts RAD publishing with debugging
Be careful when using the RAD publishing feature. If you change files and close Visual Studio Code without a build (Ctrl+Shift+B), publish (Ctrl+F5, Ctrl+Shift+F5), or debug (F5, Shift+F5), all RAD changes will be lost. If you do a RAD publishing in the next Visual Studio Code session, it is done on the latest changes and not the prior changes. This action can lead to an incomplete published package if it succeeds. Consequently, it's a best practice to do a regular publish. You can always check the RAD file in the code project to see what application objects are going to be changed during publishing.