Symbols of madness

As you know we have been happily developing extensions for a while now. Every once in a while I blog about some stuff I found out recently but it is mostly smooth sailing at the moment.

Today I was stumped though. For some reason my symbols were not loading. I make it a point to always develop extensions on a standard NAV2018 database (our current version, move to BC on prem is planned but not yet started) but sometimes I need to add functions or parameters that have been requested through Microsoft’s GitHub. And then of course load symbols. Now my symbols are always created automatically by using the finsql command line switch generatesymbolreference=yes as described here. And it always works. I thought.

So what had happened? I had updated my local NAV2018 to CU 9 a while ago. No problems there, just some bug fixes I needed for another extension. But when I added my C/Side function on my NAV2018 CU6 test server my symbols would not load. After checking my Launch settings about 100 times I finally checked my symbols files. That showed this.

So my extension had symbols files for both CU6 and CU9. And of course the VS Code compiler uses the latest build. So I binned my .app files, downloaded symbols and published my extension without trouble.

As a bonus another symbols problem we found out a while ago. If you have multiple service tiers running your symbols wont generate with the standard batch script, even though it says it is working just fine.

finsql.exe Command=generatesymbolreference, Database="Demo Database NAV (11-0)", ServerName=.\NAVDEMO

What you need to do is add your service tier information.

finsql.exe Command=generatesymbolreference, Database="Demo Database NAV (11-0)", ServerName=SQLServer, navservername=Servicetier.domain, navserverinstance=DynamicsNAV110, navservermanagementport=7045

That should generate your symbols.

Have I forgotten something? Have tips and trick I don’t know yet? Please let me know.