What objects were added?

Yesterday, I got a question that I found was too difficult to answer: “What tables were added in 20.5?”

The reason for this question was simple: we need to update the manually created permissionsets in order for new tables to be supported after an upgrade. So – what tables were added?

There are a number of ways to deal with this, like exporting the AllObj-table from both versions, and do some kind of VLOOKUP in excel. I didn’t want to spend those 10 minutes to do that. I wanted to spend a few hours in creating a PowerShell script 🤪.

And here is the result:

$Sourcebranch = 'be-19'
$Targetbranch = 'be-20'
$ForcePull = $false
$ObjectType = 'Table'

set-location "C:\_source\MSDyn365BC.Code.History"

$ObjectPattern = '(ObjectType) +([0-9]+) +("[^"]*"|[\w]*)([^"\n]*"[^"\n]*)?'
if ($ObjectType){
    $ObjectPattern = $ObjectPattern -replace "ObjectType", $ObjectType
} else {
    $ObjectPattern = $ObjectPattern -replace "ObjectType", 'codeunit|page|pagecustomization|pageextension|reportextension|permissionset|permissionsetextension|profile|query|report|requestpage|table|tableextension|xmlport|enum|enumextension|controladdin|interface|interface|entitlement|controladdin'
}

if ($ForcePull){
    & git config diff.renameLimit 999999
    & git checkout $SourceBranch 
    & git prune
    & git pull 
    & git checkout $TargetBranch 
    & git prune
    & git pull 
    & git checkout master
    & git prune
}

$AllObjects = . git diff $SourceBranch $TargetBranch --diff-filter=A --name-only

if ($ObjectType){
    $SelectString = ".*(\.$ObjectType).al"
} else {
    $SelectString = ".*.al"
}

$AllObjects | Select-String $SelectString | ForEach-Object {
    $CurrObj = $_
    
    $MatchingLines = Get-Content $CurrObj | Select-String $ObjectPattern
    
    if($MatchingLines){
        $MatchingLines = $MatchingLines.ToString();

        $IsTemp = Get-Content $CurrObj | Select-String "TableType = Temporary"

        if ($IsTemp){
            $MatchingLines += " *** TEMP ***"
        }
        Write-Host $MatchingLines -ForegroundColor Green

    } else {
        Write-Host $CurrObj -ForegroundColor Yellow
    }
    
}

It absolutely isn’t anything special – and probably there are better ways to do this (I used to be faster with PowerShell – I’m clearly getting old 😱). I just wanted to share the script should anyone be interested 🤷‍♂️.

A few words of explanation:

• This script uses the great repo from Stefan Maron, which you can find here. It contains all the necessary info I need: all added files between certain commits or branches.
• On top of the script, you can set some parameters, like:
  • branch-names you’d like to compare
  • What object type you’re interested in (leave empty for all)
  • If you’d like to force pulling all commits from these branches
  • The local path to the Stefan’s repository
• It uses some git-commands to pull (or update) the branches. Probably many improvements could be made here – but I didn’t care too much, as long as I got my result 🤪.
• It is going to use git diff to get the differences between two branches (or commits)
• The files of that output are being parsed to get more interesting info: object type, id, and name – if possible (many improvements can be made in this directions)

When you successfully ran the script, you simply get a list of objects:

Enjoy – and have a nice weekend!