Automatic deployment of RTC Control Add-in

A few weeks ago a customer asked us for a replacement for a Notepad integration. They were using it for a long time with the Classic Client, but since they recently upgraded to the Role Tailored Client, they asked us if it was possible to integrate Notepad (or something like that) with the RTC.

So we decided to develop a Rich Text Editor for the RTC. The first release looks like this screen:

Challenge

One of the challenges of writing a Control Add-in is the deployment. If the Add-in isn’t deployed correctly, you will see an error on the page like this:

The correct deployment consists of the following steps:

1. Copy the assembly to the Add-in folder of the Role Tailored Client
2. Register the Add-in in Microsoft Dynamics NAV:
   1. Find the public key token of the Add-in assembly
   2. Add the name and public key token to table 2000000069 Client Add-in

For more detailed information on this see this article on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd983804.aspx

These steps involve a lot of manual to-do’s:

• Copy the assembly to all clients
• Find the public key token with some command line tool
• Manually enter the name and token into the Client Add-in table

Because I didn’t want to explain our customer they had to copy a dll to a certain folder on every single workstation that was using NAV, and nor wanted to travel to their office or trying to do it remote, I decided to come up with a solution for automatic deployment, including the assembly file.

Automatic deployment

The solution for automatic deployment consist of two Codeunits. One is a helper Codeunit with generic functions to deploy the Control Add-in if needed. The other Codeunit contains the detailed information of the Control Add-in itself.

Helper Codeunit

The first two functions of the helper Codeunit are self explaining:

In the function ClientAddInAvailable there is a call to the function AssemblyExists. This function contains a lot of .Net code. Basically it performs the following steps:

1. Loop through all available assemblies in the Add-in folder
2. For each assembly, check the public key token
3. If the public key token is correct, determine if it is a valid Control Add-in
4. If it is a valid Control Add-in search for the name of the Control Add-in
5. If all of the above is correct, then the assembly is available

If the assembly is not available, we must create it in the Add-in folder. The function CreateAssembly accepts three parameters:

FileName: the filename of the assembly.

Folder: a subfolder to be created in the Add-in folder. Leave this empty to put the assembly directly into the Add-in folder.

Data: this is a BigText variable that contains the complete assembly in Base64 encoding.

On Windows systems with User Account Control enabled, the user might not have access to the Add-in folder. Only a process that is running as Administrator has access to this folder by default. The function IsElevated checks if the process has permissions. If not, it starts a separate elevated process. Of course the user must be warned before:

When the elevated command is run, the user get a screen like this:

After this, the Page continues to load including the just-in-time deployed Control Add-in!

Add-in Codeunit

The Codeunit with detailed information about the Add-in (in this example the Rich Text Editor), including the Base64 encoded data:

The Page only needs to run this Add-in Codeunit from the OnInit trigger:

Base64 encoding of the assembly

A little more about the Base 64 encoding.

First I have to say that an alternative to the Base64 encoding could be to place a copy of the assembly on the Dynamics NAV server and to use the DOWNLOAD command. However, that involves more setup because you have to make sure that the file is on the server, that it is the correct one, etc. The solution with the Base64 encoding gives you the opportunity to completely embed the dll into a Codeunit. In that case only the fob needs to be imported. Which is exactly the normal deployment we are used to!

But, you might ask: how do you get the Base64 encoding into this Codeunit? Well, I made a small application for that. This app reads the information of a Control Add-in assembly and creates the Add-in Codeunit.

After selecting an assembly, the information is displayed. Fill in an ID and name for the Add-in Codeunit to be created, include the ID of the Helper Codeunit and click Create.

The tool including the Helper Codeunit can be downloaded here: RTCAddInHelper NAV 2009 R2

Important 1: The zip contains the file Microsoft.Dynamics.Framework.UI.Extensibility.dll. Extract this file together with the executable to the same folder.

Important 2: This is a version for NAV 2009 R2. I will have a version for NAV 2013 available on short term.

Enjoy!