Last Monday, December 7, 2020, the students of the technical track did meet again online with their trainer, Luc van Vugt, to continue the second half of what we still call the 4th week of the Opgona Junior Training. In our previous resume we explained that, due to the corona pandemic, we had split up week 4 and re-planned the original schedule.
technical track
Week 4.b addressed the topics that remained of week 4: data exchange, upgrade, and SQL matters.
Under the umbrella of data exchange attention was being paid to the use of XMLports, Queries and APIs. The XMLport was being used in a challenging extension to the Seminar Registration case: importing transactional data from an external system into a journal, updating the database at different levels and even enabling automatic posting of these transactions. It was a nice new challenge for the students, learning the importance of cutting up an assignment and taking one step at a time, coding and testing wise. With no exception the students showed they are well fit to this.
Based on a change in the Seminar Registration data model, on Thursday morning, the concept of a upgrade codeunit was introduced leading to the next part of this week: the students were assigned the task to write proper upgrade code to handle this data model change. It was fun to see how they relatively easily handled this.
The week was concluded on Friday morning with the topic SQL matters, discussing SQL specific matters that are directly or indirectly influenced from AL code: what are indexes, their pros and cons, and how can you have influence on them? when to lock explicitly? how to prevent and/or solve deadlocks?
Again a big compliment to the attendees on for their focus, involvement, collaboration and working discipline.
what’s next
Having worked 4+ course weeks on Dynamics 365 Business Central topic wise, the technical students should be set to get working on an integrating project, in the fifth and concluding week of the course, in which they will be challenged on what they have learned. The course will close with a demo of the application that will result from the integrating project. A board of invitees will be judging the demos.
