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Recommend Apps

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The Microsoft commercial marketplace offers a wide variety of apps from Microsoft and our partners that extend the value of Business Central. As a Microsoft partner, you can save yourself, and your customers, a bit of legwork by using the Recommended Apps extension to curate a list of apps that are right for your customers' businesses. Recommended Apps is a per-tenant extension (PTE), which means that you can make collections unique for each customer, or build collections specifically for certain types of businesses or industries and then reuse the collections when you're on-boarding those types of customers. For example, you can create one collection for customers who work in finance, and another for customers in the retail space. For more information, see Maintain AppSource Apps and Per-Tenant Extensions in Business Central Online.

Before you begin

You can only add apps that are available on AppSource to your collection. That is, you can't host your own app and add it to the list.

You must update the app.json file with the dependency of the Recommended Apps per-tenant extension.

  {
    "id":  "a53a4bb0-aa53-8ff8-77d6-fe3388db0eb8",
    "name":  "Recommended Apps",
    "publisher":  "Microsoft",
    "version":  "23.0.0.0"
  }

Building collections requires some development. To make that easier, Business Central provides the following objects:

  • Recommended Apps List page
  • Recommended App Card page
  • Recommended Apps table
  • Recommended Apps codeunit

You must use the Recommended Apps codeunit to build collections. The following table provides an overview of the methods in the codeunit. You can copy the information for the parameters from the listing for the app on AppSource.

Method Description
InsertApp Add information about the apps from AppSource to the Recommended Apps table. When adding new apps, you can simply paste the URL for the app from AppSource for the AppSourceUrl parameter, and Business Central will add the relevant parts to the other parameters. However, you must manually complete the Short Description, Long Description, and Recommended By parameters.
GetApp Get information from AppSource about the apps that are already added to the Recommended Apps table.
UpdateApp Update the information about the apps that are already added to the Recommended Apps table.
RefreshImage Update the logo for the app. When you insert an app, the image is downloaded automatically. Use if the logo has changed.
DeleteApp Delete an app from the collection. You provide the app ID.
DeleteAllApps Delete all apps from the collection.
GetAppURL Get the URL for a specific app. You provide the app ID.

Providing the collection to customers

When your collection is ready, you can deploy it to customer tenants. For more information, see Deploying a Tenant Customization. Afterward, the Recommended Apps page will display the apps and your customer can install them. Customers can choose the app in the list to learn more about it, and the details include a link to install the app from AppSource.

Onboarding experiences in Business Central