Since COVID fell upon us we have been conducting week 4 online fully. To prevent too much load on the students being only online we have spread this one week n-site over two online: week 4a and 4b.
On Monday November 22 the studnets and trainer gathered online.
week 4a – technical track
The two main topics of week 4a were reports, both printable and non-printable, and test automation. But before we started with reporting, we had a review of the homework of week 3: completing the Support Registration case, that was handed over to the students as their homework assignment on the last day of week 3. The learnings for the students concerned coding best practices, work planning and design patterns. Things they had learned (about) in week 3 and had to apply in this assignment.
Given the trainer’s feedback the student had to write a retrospect of the project addressing questions like “How did you go about with the planning?”, “What did you finish and could have been delivered?” and “How did you involve your stakeholder(s)?”. They also had to include their learnings by means of tips and tops. Next to this they had to compose a check list to be used in any next project to help to check on specific things at delivery.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday – Reporting
Now we could start with reporting, and typically with the basic concept of reports: the data set generator with its dataitem control. Creating robust, maintainable and extendable reports all depends on a well defined dataset. So, that’s where we started. No bothering about the layout yet, only the dataset. How to set it up, how to make it as lean as possible and how to inspect it using the Excel export. There were quite a number of great learnings in this part, even though all students had been working with reports already. And because of the latter we could dive into more details than we normally due during this training.
Once the dataset basics had been discussed the layout was included. Armored with this knowledge the students continued with the Seminar Registration case of week 3, to extend it with a participant list. It was not only about building this basic report, but also learning various technicalities like conditional coloring, grouping, alternating background coloring and dynamic visibility. Everything things should be added to Azure DevOps by means of a pull request, like was done in week 3.
Next to building printable reports, processing only reports were discussed and worked on, being a nice alternative to using codeunits.
On Wednesday morning the reporting part was rounded of discussing the different layout options: RDLC, Word and Excel.
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – Test Automation
The remaining part of this week was dedicated to test automation. A discipline any modern BC implementation cannot do without anymore. After a first introduction into the topic the students got to work on a number of spoon-fed test cases for the Seminar Registration app. Once they got the gist of it, and were introduced in some more advanced parts, they jointly continued with a dozen of high level ATDD defined scenarios. Well done!
what’s next
Each student had his/her own package of homework to take with them: closing open ends, i.e., not yet completed exercises of the week behind and parts of the Support Registration case that were not yet implemented.
The group will meet on-line again for week 4b on December 18, 2023, to continue with data exchange, upgrade, and SQL matters finalizing our road to the last project in week 5.
