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 guides you through the process.
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”).
In order for the Simple Object Designer to work, it must know about what tables, pages, and reports your Business Central has. Adding a field to a table is only possible with information about the table. We call that information Symbols. So one of the very first screens you’ll meet in the Simple Object Designer is the Download Symbols page.
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 have updated our payment system and can now handle subscriptions with automated yearly renewals.
If you have purchased your Simple Object Designer before March 2023 this is the last time you will need to purchase a new license key and enter it into your Simple Object Designer.
If you choose to unsubscribe, 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.
A published extension might stop working in future versions of Business Central due to changes from Microsoft.
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.
Normal deployment is configured to avoid data loss. To allow data loss due to changing or deleting fields and tables, you must set the Publish Update Mode in the setup 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.