SimonOfHH

It’s been quiet for some time here, but I didn’t abandon the blog. There was just a lot to do and there was little time for new stuff.

This post won’t be very long, just a quick introduction of a little helper Module I created. I wanted an easy way to visualize app-dependencies for Business Central. I know that you can easily get dependencies for an app with PowerShell, but I wanted a way to quickly see all dependent apps for a specific other app (e.g. show all dependent apps for “Base Application”).

I created the module D365BCAppHelper for this. This module contains the function Write-DependencyTree. I’ll give you a real quick example on this:

PS C:\run> Write-DependencyTree -AppName "Base Application"
| [0] > [Base Application]
| [1] --> [_Exclude_APIV1_]
| [1] --> [_Exclude_ClientAddIns_]
| [1] --> [Business Central Intelligent Cloud]
| [1] --> [Essential Business Headlines]
| [1] --> [Intelligent Cloud Base]
| [2] ----> [Business Central Intelligent Cloud]
| [1] --> [PayPal Payments Standard]
| [1] --> [Sales and Inventory Forecast]
| [1] --> [Send remittance advice by email]

This way you can quickly see all apps that are depending on “Base Application” (in this example). You can also directly see for example that the app “Business Central Intelligent Cloud” has a dependency for “Intelligent Cloud Base” and “Base Application” as well.

If you now have you own apps, with custom dependencies you can easily visualize these as well. For the next example I created 2 additional apps. The first one “Dependency1” has “Base Application” as a dependency. The second one “Dependency2” only has “Dependency1” as a dependency. The output for this looks like the following:

PS C:\run> Write-DependencyTree -AppName "Base Application"
| [0] > [Base Application]
| [1] --> [_Exclude_APIV1_]
| [1] --> [_Exclude_ClientAddIns_]
| [1] --> [Business Central Intelligent Cloud]
| [1] --> [Dependency1]
| [2] ----> [Dependency2]
| [1] --> [Essential Business Headlines]
| [1] --> [Intelligent Cloud Base]
| [2] ----> [Business Central Intelligent Cloud]
| [1] --> [PayPal Payments Standard]
| [1] --> [Sales and Inventory Forecast]
| [1] --> [Send remittance advice by email]

Of course, you can also call it direclty for your app. Following shows the output for calling directly for “Dependency1“

PS C:\run> Write-DependencyTree -AppName "Dependency1"
| [0] > [Dependency1]
| [1] --> [Dependency2]

If you want to use this module yourself just run “Install-Module -Name D365BCAppHelper” and afterwards “Import-Module -Name D365BCAppHelper“

As always: feel free to ask any questions, provide feedback for improvements, report bugs… you can find the code on Github.