Eric's Tech Blog

First, forgive the title of this post.  I couldn't help myself. Now that we're past that, every now and then I get called on to make SOAP work for customers.  It used to be pretty popular back in the day (2009-ish) but now REST (specifically OData in the NAV/BC world) is all the rage.  I like OData, it's easier to work with for most purposes but even now there are still a few things that SOAP is better at.  One thing that makes SOAP difficult is that it's got a more complex structure and is not easily understood.  With OData, you just set your verb and give it a little JSON and you're up and running.  I recently had to help someone get SOAP working and in the process I debugged the calls with Wireshark and Fiddler and I wanted to document what I got out of that.  It might just help me a few years from now and help someone else sooner. First the basics.  In the interest of being complete, I'll jot down the first steps just in case anyone else is lo...

Today I was updating some report objects from a text file for an older BC13 upgrade.  Yes, even at this late date BC13 can be an "upgrade".  Long story.  Anyhow, in the process of pulling in reports I got an error message To upgrade reports, you must have Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Report Builder installed. The problem is, I did have SQL Server 2016 Report Builder installed.  Some cursory Googling revealed that someone else had run across this and their solution was to install an older version of the report builder.  Not satisfied with this option, I ran the import under Process Monitor .  Process Monitor showed that BC was looking for Microsoft.ReportingServices.RdlObjectModel.dll and not finding it.  Sure enough, that file was nowhere to be found.  I did find an article on that indicating that it was a part of older report builder installations and I managed to find it on my development system under some Docker containers (of all places)....

 Recently, I've noticed that trying to debug a sandbox that isn't named "Sandbox" has not worked.  The first few times I just worked around it but I finally came to a place where I couldn't ignore it anymore.  While my extension was deploying to the correct sandbox, the browser was opening to the default sandbox and errors were just causing the web client to hang and VS Code's debugger to terminate.  The solution was pretty simple: there is a server option in the launch.json that you can use to specify the correct URL.  Once I did that, debugging worked as it should.