The upcoming Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 release (version 22) together with the new AL extension version 11.X will introduce some hidden new AL code-related features for improving the integration with Power Automate and Power Platform + Dataverse in general.
For integrating Power Automate flows in Dynamics 365 Business Central pages, two new customaction types are introduced: FlowTemplate and FlowTemplateGallery.
The new FlowTemplate custom action permits you to directly open the Power Automate template wizard. The user can then follow the wizard to create a flow using the specified template. The usage is as follows:
Here:
- FlowTemplateID is the ID of the template to open (GUID)
- FlowCaption is the default caption of the newly created flow.
The new FlowTemplateGallery custom action permits you to open the Power Automate template gallery, filtered to a specific category. The user can then follow the wizard to create a flow using a template selected from the gallery. The usage is as follows:
where:
- FlowTemplateCategoryName is the category of template to display.
- FlowCaption is the default caption of the newly created flow.
Remember that when you submit a flow as a template, you can specify a pre-defined category or you can create your custom categories:
To improve the possibility to interact with Dataverse-based applications, the possibility to declare and use business events to notify and trigger external systems is introduced in Dynamis 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 release.
The new attribute ExternalBusinessEvent can mark a procedure to be an external event which will raise an event that an external service like Dataverse can subscribe to it. This attribute can be used together with InherentPermissions to add extra required permissions to subscribe to the event.
The new syntax is as follows:
Please remember that actually external business events does not support records as parameters:
I think that external business events will be a key part for future integrations, expecially for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 applications. To interact with Dynamics 365 Business Central external business events, you can create a workflow by using Power Automate or Azure Logic Apps and the Dataverse connector.
In the Dataverse connector, you can select the When an action is performed trigger and here select Dynamics 365 Business Central as catalog, select the event category and then the event name:
This new possibility to handle external business events will be available starting from April 2023.
As a note not strictly related to this post, please also remember that the syntax of event suscribers has now a small change to allow specifying identifiers to reference the event you are subscribing to, and to reference the target element for trigger events.
The new syntax is as follows:
This syntax allows to navigate from the subscriber to the event and to see the event hover information. You can now also see who is subscribing to your events:
In order to facilitate the conversion, code actions have been introduced to convert one, some, or all event subscribers in your project or workspace to the new syntax:
Start using it…
Stefano Demiliani 