Help and notification.
To make one thing clear. The help we are used to build for the help server is not yet available for Extensions. Therefore we must make sure that all the help we anticipate the user needs will be available from the product.
Microsoft have added tool tips to most of the fields in the application. To make sure you follow the requirements create tool tips and make sure to have the property for Application Area populated.
In the previous post about the installation process you can see that a link to the Extension help must be provided. I did short videos and posted them to YouTube.
With NAV 2017 and Dynamics 365 for Financials Microsoft released a new notification framework. It is important to use this framework in your Extension. For example, when a user open the General Ledger Entries after the G/L Source Names Extension installation a notification will appear.
And when the user reacts to the notification a setup video will start inside the web client.
The notification disappears and will not be displayed again for this user.
If the administrator has done the Assisted Setup and the user has the required permissions we will show a different notification.
and that notification will play the usage video.
Now, let’s look at how to do this.
There is a new data type for Notification. You define variable of type Notification, set the properties and send it on it’s way.
I start by catching the event when the General Ledger Entries page is opened. Then, depending on the permissions the user has to G/L Source Names table I select between two notifications.
You can have up to three actions added to each notification. An action must point to a public function in a Codeunit. That function must have a single parameter of type Notification.
The notification ID is a Guid. Refer to my last post on how to get a new Guid and keep that Guid for the notification. The history of the notification – which user has acted on it, is saved by this ID. Change it and the history will be lost. Today, all the notifications must have Local Scope. The Global Scope is not yet supported by the clients.
In the action for both these notifications I start a YouTube video for the user. If the user is running web client, including phone client and tablet client, the video will be started inside the client. For other client types I will start the video in the default browser.
That concludes my development. Next part is to submit my Extension to AppSource. Stay tuned…