This is the second post of the blog post series “Boost Your Productivity with AL and Business Central”. If you want to know more about what this series is about and why I created it, you can checkout this post. Today’s post will be a very short one. I will show you how you can use Todo Tree by Gruntfuggly and TODO Highlight by Wayou Liu to track the Todos in your VS Code Project.

Sometimes you are in a situation where you know you will later have to implement something, but you do not want to or can not do it now. People like to mark these things as “todo”. Unfortunately, in C/AL there was no way to easily keep track of these todos. At least I do not know of any easy way.

With AL, we have the possibility to keep track of all our // TODO comments. Using these // TODO comments, we can ensure that all our TODOs are finished before we ship our extensions or finish our project.

Example

Images sometimes speak more than thousand words, so let’s have a look at an example. You are a developer and writing a function “TestForBlogPost”. While doing that, you already know that you will need a second function that does the calculations, in this case “CalcMyQuantity”.

Of course you could simply write the Code for “CalcMyQuantity” and then go back to your first function ” TestForBlogPost”. Maybe you do not know the code for “CalcMyQuantity” now, but still want to write the code for your first function “TestForBlogPost”.

This is a situation where it can be useful to use a // TODO Comment like shown below. You might have noticed, that the keyword “TODO” is highlighted thanks to the TODO Highlight extension.

If you have installed the extension Todo Tree I mentioned at the beginning of the blogpost, this comment will automatically be shown in a new little window called “TODOS”.

Besides, you have a new little icon on your left navigation pane for you Todo Tree:

Incredibly handy!

That’s it for today. Have a nice week. 🙂