Simple Object Designer

Empowering you to customize Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central without writing a single line of code

FAQ

Most frequent questions and answers

The easiest way to get started is to follow the link below to watch the short video that guide you through the process.

Introduction and walk-through video

To avoid cluttering your role centers with menu items, the Object Designer is only available by searching for it. (Tell Me Alt-Q for Object Designer).

Yes, one license for the Simple Object Designer covers both production and sandbox environments for one tenant.

Unfortunately, the Object Designer does not work on-premises. It uses several features in Business Central that are only available in the cloud.

There are no limitations on localization. The Simple Object Designer works on all localized versions of Business Central.

The Simple Object Designer is currently available in the following languages:
Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish

The Object Designer is getting regular updates all the time. You can force the update from Admin Center (select the environment and open “Apps”).

Click Buy/register the Object Designer at the bottom of the Information section on the main menu of the Simple Object Designer. Then enter your registration code on this page.

We will send you a reminder when it is time to renew your licence. You click the link in the email or go to Hougaard.com/shop to buy a licence renewal. You will get a new registration code to enter into your Simple Object Designer.

Your new year of licencing will be added to the end of your current licence, and you can renew whenever it is convenient for you.

If you choose not to renew your licence, you cannot create new customizations, but all the objects you have created with the Simple Object Designer will still work.


Access to the published extensions with your objects is always free and available regardless of the license for the Simple Object Designer.

Symbols are information on all the objects (tables, reports etc.) in your Business Central. The Simple Object Designer needs to know about these symbols to add new fields to your Business Central.

Because there are a lot of symbols, about 100 megabytes of symbols, to be exact. Processing these can take a bit of time.

In general, no. Adding a limited number of fields to existing tables in Business Central will not have a negative impact on the user experience. However, if you’re adding 100s of field into a high traffic table, that can produce significant slowdowns.


There is no difference in performance between fields added with the Simple Object Designer or by a senior developer.

A deployment that will delete a field (or a feature) must be done manually by uploading the app file in Extension Management and setting Schema update mode to Force.

Go to https://github.com/hougaard/Simple-Object-Designer/issues and request the field transfer for a future version of the Object Designer.
We use published events (programming hooks) from Microsoft to do the field transfers, and we cannot add the field transfer if no event is available.