BC Symbols Downloader

VS Code extension that downloads the Business Central symbol packages referenced by your app.json from NuGet feeds and drops the .app files into .alpackages. It is a port of the original scripts/restore-symbols.sh, with support for additional and private feeds.

Command

• BC: Download Symbols from Nuget — resolves application, platform, and every dependencies[] entry in the nearest app.json and downloads matching symbols into .alpackages.
• BC: Manage NuGet Feed Credentials — store a credential for a private feed.
• BC: Clear NuGet Feed Credentials — remove a stored credential.

How resolution works

For each package the highest version on the requested major line that is >= the app.json version is chosen (BC dependency versions are minimums). NuGet strips trailing-zero revisions, so 27.0.0.0 in app.json matches 27.0.0 on the feed. Downloaded (package, version) pairs are cached in .alpackages/.cache/, so re-runs only fetch what changed.

Settings

Adding a private feed

"bcSymbols.feeds": [
  {
    "name": "My Company Symbols",
    "url": "https://pkgs.dev.azure.com/<org>/<project>/_packaging/<feed>/nuget/v3/index.json",
    "authentication": "pat",     // "none" | "pat" | "basic"
    "packageNameSchema": "{publisher}.{name}.symbols.{appId}"
  }
]

• pat — an Azure DevOps Personal Access Token (sent as the HTTP Basic password). Prompted on first use.
• basic — username + password.
• Credentials are stored in the OS secret store via VS Code Secret Storage — never written to settings.json. Feeds are searched in order and the first one that has a matching package version wins, so if a private feed should take precedence, set bcSymbols.useDefaultFeeds to false or list it first.

Custom package name schema

Feeds that publish symbols under a different id convention than Microsoft's can set an optional, feed-scoped packageNameSchema. When present, it replaces the default <publisher>.<name>.symbols.<id> naming when the extension looks up and downloads packages from that feed.

"packageNameSchema": "{publisher}.{name}.symbols.{appId}"

• Placeholders are substituted from each dependencies[] entry:
  • {publisher} — the dependency's publisher
  • {name} — the dependency's name
  • {appId} — the dependency's id (the app GUID)
• All three placeholders are optional, but a schema must include at least one of {name} or {appId} so that packages can be told apart ({publisher} alone is not enough — dependencies often share a publisher). A schema that satisfies neither is ignored (the feed falls back to the default naming) and a note is written to the BC Symbols output channel. Placeholder names are case-insensitive, so {appId} and {appid} behave the same.
• The substituted {publisher} and {name} values are sanitized the same way as the default id (only . _ - are kept; other characters are dropped) and the whole resulting id is lowercased. Any literal text you put between placeholders is preserved.
• Each placeholder accepts an optional :separator modifier that rewrites the word-separator characters (space, ., -, _) in that value before sanitizing. Use it when a feed normalizes separators differently from the app name — e.g. a dependency named Example-Extension_Test-1 published as example_extension_test_1 is matched with "packageNameSchema": "{name:_}".
• The schema applies to dependency packages (dependencies[]) only. The Application and Platform first-party packages always keep their built-in microsoft.*.symbols naming, regardless of the feed's schema.

Develop

npm install
npm run compile     # or: npm run watch

Press F5 ("Run Extension") to launch an Extension Development Host.