How to upgrade an AL Extension?

ahsanmukhtar

Good morning all,
I am come back to Dynamics Nav 2018 after couple of years now to find that Extensions is the new way to customize Nav! I have developed a simple extension and successfully managed to publish it on my local laptop where I have installed Nav 2018. This extension is working fine. Then I changed this extension by adding a new field in a table which was already part of this extension and now I want to publish this changed extension but do not know how to go about it! There is no data upgrade involved, so in my mind I should be able to uninstall the old extension, change the version number on the extension and then republish it. Am I going in the right direction? Any help will be greatly appreciated! Looking at online material I can see some powershell commands but I am sure there must be some other way to deal with these simple upgrade tasks!
Thanks in advance for all your help!!
Ahsan

DenSter

This is how you do it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-upgrading-extensions

ahsanmukhtar

Thanks Dan, much appreciated!
I have already gone through this article and managed to upgrade my extension. I am going to try something which is a bit more complex now with some dependencies and see how much I have managed to learn!
Thanks again

ahsanmukhtar

Can I ask you another question please?
In VSC, if I do Ctrl+Shift+P and type AL: I can see a list of commands which includes Publish command (F5). However if I use this command it not only publishes the extension, it also synchronizes the data and installs the extension on my local Nav 2018. Is there a way to Publish, Synchronize, Upgrade and Install an extension in individual steps without using Powershell and its commands like Publish, Sync, Upgrade, Install etc.?

DenSter

You use VSCode to do development, F5 just publishes the app that you're working on to the service tier that you specify in launch.json. It takes care of the PowerShell for you, there's no way that I know that you can bypass that mechanism.

To publish apps to non-development BC tenants you have to use the PS Cmdlets. There's a purpose to each step, and there's PS Cmdlets for those steps. It's just how it works. The only other way to get an app into a tenant is to use the upload functionality in the Extension Management page.

ahsanmukhtar

Thanks Dan! Got the handle on it now

oldspike333

Hi together,
I have similar situation as in first post.
i have a simple extension with a new table in 50100 area and two pages.
the extension works.
now I make a further new field in table and the two pages.
now i push F5 in VS Code but the change will not be puplished, still the first version wirhout the new field is active.
i also tried to increase the version no,
still the same problem.
i have BC14 on premise.
of course in a productive environment some power shell commands must be used, but during development for each simple change this should work from vs code to test the change immediatelly.
can anyone help me please?