Do you love reports? Personally, NO! But that is, as a Business Central developer I think that sometimes (forced or not) you need to work with reports in your solutions. As a quick recap, in Dynamics 365 Business Central a report layout controls content and format of the report, including which data fields of a report dataset appear on the report and how they are arranged, text style, images, and more. From Business Central, you can change which layout is used on a report, create new layout, or modify the existing layouts. A report can be set up with multiple report layouts, which you can…

Some days ago I discussed with some partners the architecture of a possible datawarehouse system for external BI analysis connected to Dynamics 365 Business Central data. They created an Azure SQL database where a “data sync” with Dynamics 365 Business Central was in place and they perform BI analysis on this external database. The raised question was after this work was: can we protect our Azure SQL Database without using a public endpoint and without traffic routed to Internet (so, not only with a firewall rule on the incoming IP addresses)? The answer was: yes, now you can. Use a…

Yesterday Microsoft has officially released one of the most requested feature for the Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS environment: point in time restore for environments . If you access your tenant’s Admin Center and select an environment, now you can see the following option: The new Restore option permits you to restore an existing environment from a time in the past, within the 30-day retention period. An environment can only be restored within the same Business Central version (minor and major), with some rules and limitations: A production environment can be restored…

I’m happy to announce that our book, “Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure: Re-architect and rebuild your applications using cloud-native technologies”, made it to BookAuthority’s Best Microsoft Azure Books of All Time . As featured on CNN, Forbes and Inc. , BookAuthority collects and ranks the best books in the world, and it is a great honor to get this kind of recognition. Thanks to the guys who worked hard with me to this project and thank you for all your support! The book is available for purchase on Amazon .

The standard (and for what I can see most used) way of using Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs is by sending an HTTP request to the API endpoint for the selected entity one request at a time: But if you need to perform massive operations (like for example inserting multiple journal lines in a batch) this could be not too much performant. Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs (standard and custom ones) support batch requests, where you can combine multiple API operations in a single HTTP request (so, a single call with a body that contains an array of operations) and receive as output…