Business Central 2024 wave 2 (BC25): Wildcard search (* and ?) in AL Explorer

Hi, Readers.
The public preview for Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 release wave 2 (BC25) is available. Learn more: Link.

I will continue to test and share some new features that I hope will be helpful.

In this post, I would like to talk about Wildcard search in AL Explorer in Business Central 2024 release wave 2 (BC25). This is not yet documented in the Business Central 2024 release wave 2 (BC25) release plan. But it is mentioned in AL Language extension changelog Version 14.0

The AL Explorer provides a tool that allows you to explore, navigate, and better understand objects in extensions. You can drill down into object details, dependencies, and extension points, without looking at the code. With the AL Explorer, you have an overview of high-level structures of extensions that can help you specify new features, or do light troubleshooting.
AL: Explorer: Ctrl + Shift + F12

After running this command, you will open AL Explorer. You can easily see an overview of all objects in a given app scope—for example, a whole workspace or selected project—and you can search in object names, and group objects by type.

More details: Business Central 2023 wave 1 (BC22): AL Explorer and AL Home in Visual Studio Code AL extension

But there is a small problem here, since this feature was released, it only supports exact search. For example, in Version: W1 24.4
item: All results containing the input value will be displayed

item*: No Rows…

i?em: No Rows…

In Version: W1 25.0:
item*:

i?em:

This can also be used in combination. For example, fixed as?et*

Yes, the search functionality in AL Explorer supports  * and ? wildcards.

(*) An indefinite number of unknown characters

(?) One unknown character

Great improvement. Give it a try!!!😁

PS: You can find more details from AL Explorer

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Hope this will help.

Thanks for reading.

ZHU