Up until this point, we've been building a brand new application, but what about all the great CAL solutions that have been created on the Dynamics NAV platform? Sure, you can always re-code them from scratch, but you don't have to. Microsoft has provided a tool that allows us to convert existing CAL objects to new AL-based ones. We'll take a look at what that process looks like, as well as some of the things that need to happen when the conversion is done.

Handling the source code is one step of the conversion from CAL to AL. We'll also explore how to upgrade the data that was held in the old CAL objects. Remember, with a modern development extension platform, the data in any AL table or field no longer resides in the same physical place in the database, so we need a way to move it.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes...