Serialize a Sales Order to JSON

Medium

json

serialization

sales-order

Serialize a Sales Order to JSON

Your company's new warehouse partner picks up sales orders through a REST integration, and the payload format is settled: one JSON document per order — header fields at the top, one array element per line. The first attempt, hand-rolled string concatenation, already blew up twice in the pilot: a colleague in Copenhagen produced "quantity": 2,5, and an order for 24" brackets broke the document at the inch mark.

Your job is the serializer: given a sales order, produce the exact JSON document described below, identical in meaning no matter the regional settings of the session that runs it.

Requirements

Create a codeunit named "Order JSON Export" with one public procedure:

procedure ExportOrder(SalesHeader: Record "Sales Header"): Text

It returns one JSON object serialized as text. For an order with a single line, the document looks like this:

{
  "orderNo": "S-ORD-1001",
  "customerNo": "C00040",
  "orderDate": "2026-04-27",
  "lines": [
    {
      "lineNo": 10000,
      "itemNo": "I00050",
      "description": "Steel bracket 24\"",
      "quantity": 2.5,
      "unitPrice": 1249.99,
      "lineAmount": 3124.98
    }
  ]
}

Rules:

orderNo is the order's "No." and customerNo is its "Sell-to Customer No." — both JSON strings.
orderDate is the order's "Order Date" as a JSON string in ISO 8601 date format (yyyy-MM-dd) — April 27, 2026 serializes as 2026-04-27 whatever the session's regional settings are.
lines is a JSON array with exactly one object per sales line of the order, in ascending "Line No." order. Each object carries lineNo ("Line No."), itemNo ("No."), description (Description), quantity (Quantity), unitPrice ("Unit Price") and lineAmount ("Line Amount") — the field values as they stand, no recomputation.
lineNo, quantity, unitPrice and lineAmount are unquoted, culture-invariant JSON numbers: decimal point, no digit grouping — 1249.99, never 1.249,99, 1,249.99 or "1249.99".
Text values must survive hostile content: a description containing " or \ must round-trip through a JSON parser unchanged.
An order without lines serializes with "lines": [].
Property names exactly as shown — camelCase, and case matters.

What the tests check

The grading tests build sales orders with generated customers, items and amounts, call ExportOrder, re-parse the returned text with a JSON parser and assert on the parsed structure — property order, whitespace and number formatting beyond the rules above don't matter, and extra properties you emit are ignored. One test seeds a unit price above 1000 so digit grouping has somewhere to appear; one seeds a description containing " and \; one checks the exact orderDate string for a fixed date and another uses a generated date with a single-digit day and month, so the zero padding must be real; one applies a line discount so the stored "Line Amount" no longer equals Quantity * "Unit Price"; one surrounds the order with other documents — a second order and a quote sharing the order's number — and expects only the order's own lines in the array; one exports an order with no lines at all.

Learn More

Hint 1

Assembling JSON by concatenating text makes you responsible for every escaping rule and every regional number and date format. AL ships types that speak JSON natively and take both problems off your hands.

Hint 2

Build a JsonObject for the header and one JsonObject per line, collect the line objects in a JsonArray, and add the array to the header object under lines. WriteTo turns the finished object into Text.

Hint 3

Add Decimal and Integer values to a JsonObject as-is — never pre-formatted with Format() — and the writer emits culture-invariant numbers; text values are escaped for you too. Only the date needs help: Format(TheDate, 0, 9) produces the ISO 8601 yyyy-MM-dd form, ready to add as a string.

ALBusiness Central 28.5

Press Compile to check your code compiles — Submit runs the tests.

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