Update Lifecycle for Customizations of Business Central Online

When you create a tenant-specific customization, or an extension that is scoped to a single Business Central environment (often referred to as per-tenant extensions), you must take the lifecycle of the extension into consideration. For more information about the extension lifecycle and events that can cause incompatibilities between the extension and base application, see The Lifecycle of Apps and Extensions for Business Central.

You are responsible for your extension. You own the process of updating the extension and providing upgrade code if the schema changes between versions of the Business Central base application. When an update is available for your Business Central environment, all extensions, both AppSource extensions and tenant customizations, must be compatible with the next version of the base application before the update can be installed on the environment. You are responsible for ensuring that your extensions are compatible with the update version.

In this article, we describe the process for ensuring update compatibility for tenant customizations.

Automated Extension Validation

An automated service validates all tenant customizations before an update is marked for a scheduled update of an environment. This validation compares the extension's dependencies with the updated version of the Business Central application to see if any changes caused incompatibilities with the new version.

If the validation service discovers any tenant customizations that are not compatible with the update, an email notification is sent to the tenant administrators listed on the Notification recipients tab of the Business Central administration center. For more information, see Managing Tenant Notifications.

Important

At least one email address must be specified as a notification recipient to receive the update notifications. If you do not specify an email address, you will not be notified of updates and other changes to the tenant.

The email notification provides information on the incompatible extension, detail on which properties must be updated, and steps to bring the extension into compatibility.

Update Failure Notification

If a Business Central environment has an extension that is not compatible with the update version, the update cannot be applied. If an update fails due to an incompatible extension, a notification is sent to the tenant administrators listed on the Notification recipients tab of the Business Central administration center.

The notification is similar to that provided by the automated extension validation. It provides information on the incompatible extension, detail on which properties must be updated, and steps to bring the extension into compatibility.

Automatic Extension Removal

The publisher of an extension must maintain compatibility with the new release of Business Central. An extension that is not compatible with the update within 90 days of the first notification of incompatibility will be removed, and then the environment will be updated.

See Also

Retaining table data after publishing
Upgrading Extensions
Updating Environments