Regular expressions in D365 F&O

Posted on October 22nd 2020 in Dynamics 365 by Pim Debaere.

Regular expressions in D365 F&O

A lot of input validation is already handled by Dynamics 365 itself, such as checking whether a number contains no letters. Yet sooner or later you will come to a time where very specific (text) validation is required. In this post I am using the example email addresses.

Regex

We could split the value using string operations to see if the input contains an "@" and a period – in that order – and if there are only alphanumeric characters with dashes if necessary. Not only will this be a cumbersome piece of code, it will also not improve performance and there is a good chance that an error will creep in.

With the help of regular expressions (also called regex) we can do this much shorter, faster and – if we keep our wits about it – also more easily error-free. The only drawback, testing these expressions is not in standard x ++ code. But don't worry, because as you know we can easily access .net from x ++.

Below you can see a runnable class that will test a given value using a regular expression.

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class RegexTester
{
  public static void main(Args _args)
  {
    str email = 'info@example.com';

    System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex regex;
    regex = new System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex(@'^[a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+$');
    
    System.Text.RegularExpressions.Match match;
    match = regex.Match(email);
    
    boolean ret;
    ret = match.get_Success();

    info(strFmt('"%1" is %2 e-mail address.', email, ret ? 'a valid' : 'an invalid'));
  }
}

Fig. 1 – Validation of an e-mail address in x++ using regex.

This way you can quickly and easily perform complex string validations.