Introduction to AL

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”

– Harold Abelson and Julie Sussman

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”

– Charles Eames

So far, we have reviewed the basic objects of Business Central, such as tables, pages, enums, queries, and reports. For each of these except enums, we reviewed triggers in various areas, the purpose of which is to be containers for AL code. When triggers are fired (invoked), the AL code within is executed.

In this chapter, you’ll start learning the AL programming language, though you should already know about many of the things we will cover from your experience programming in other languages. The basic AL syntax and method definitions can be found in Microsoft Docs for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

As with most programming languages, we have considerable flexibility to define our own model...