As with most things in software development, there are multiple ways to perform CAL to AL conversion. Although the recipe that we looked at here is a rather simple set of PowerShell commands, there is a process that consolidates multiple steps. The reason I chose to use this process is that I'm a firm believer in understanding the entire process before you start consolidating and/or automating multiple steps. If you don't have that understanding, you'll have no idea what to do if (but most likely, when...) something goes wrong.
With that being said, NavContainerHelper does provide a slightly more streamlined approach to doing the conversion. Although the full explanation and how-to is beyond the scope of this recipe, I recommend that you take a look at the following process, which uses a much more consolidated approach to the five-step process that this recipe showed you:
- Create your container, but make sure to not use the -doNotExportObjectsToText switch:
- By not specifying the switch, all unmodified objects are exported, which takes the place of performing conversion step 1.
- Run the Convert-ModifiedObjectsToAl command:
- This performs the same functions that conversion steps 2, 3, 4, and 5 do, as well as copying the resulting AL files to a folder, which would ideally be your AL project folder.
As I said though, it's important to have the foundational knowledge of what is going on in the event that you need to make adjustments or have to deal with any issues that creep up.
You can read more about this conversion process here: https://freddysblog.com/2019/04/15/c-al-to-al-extension/.