Today on the official NAV Team Blog the February Update of NAV Development Preview has been announced. Some interesting features have been added which let us expect a lot more great features in the next few weeks and month.
One of the new features is something I’ve already seen a couple of days ago on LinkedIn and Microsoft Docs. It’s the possibility to synchronize the data while republishing or recompiling an extension V2. That means the data in extension tables and fields won’t be lost. Of course it’s still possible to use the old procedure of recreating the app with complete data loss.
So, what do we have to consider:
A new property SchemaUpdateMode in the launch.json file can be set to Synchronize or Recreate.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-nav/developer/devenv-retaining-data-after-publishing
And of course if you changed the data type of any field or the data length of for instance a code field from 30 characters to 20 you need to create an upgrade codeunit. So same procedure as you would use in C/AL has been implemented to Visual Studio Code and AL language.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-nav/developer/devenv-upgrading-extensions
See the official blog post for more information.