think about IT

I recently came across a question in the Business Central forum: How do I get information about Posted Sales Shipments in Power BI? And this is not a standalone question, I get these questions a lot in my training’s that I deliver all over the world. Many times I see answers suggesting to use existing list pages and publish them as web services, either manually or using the assisted setup: Setup Reporting Data . And although I like the Setup Reporting Data wizard in Business Central, I don’t like the results, or I should say: the performance . It’s very easy to create new web services using…

Recently someone asked me, what’s wrong with me report, it’s not showing me the correct data? After investigating I noticed that the report used filters, applied in several different ways and that the expected data was not showing up in the dataset, and then of course it was also not displayed in the layout. So, let’s see how you can apply filtering, in the dataset of a report, and let’s do this with a document. A document typically fetches information from two tables: Header and Line. Let’s take the purchase Header and Purchase Line as an example, but the same is also valid for all other…

Released Cumulative Updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4470116/released-cumulative-updates-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-business Released Updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2019 Release Wave 2: https://support.microsoft.com/nl-be/help/4528706/released-updates-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-business-central-2019 Dynamics 365 Business Central On-Premises Spring 2019 Updates: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/deployment/update-versions-14

Imagine you have created a Power BI report and you want to display in in the Customer list. Then you need to add a report filter in the Power BI report, before you publish it to your work space: Then in Business Central you can go to the customer list page and in the Power BI fact-box, select your report: But then you don’t see your report, which is available in your Power BI work-space: Why is that??? Well, there’s an easy way to find out. Start the Page Inspector: Aha, there’s a filter on this page: ReportName (2, Text) @*Customers* So let’s rename our report: …

During my reporting workshops I sometimes get the question, is it possible to create a GreenBar report and how do you do that in a matrix? A GreenBar report is actually a report where you apply shading to every other row or column. So let’s start with a simple example and let’s create a simple list report using a table. First I create a simple dataset that fetches ItemLedgers by Item: Then I add a layout: and let’s have a look at the result: Not really an amazing layout. Let’s apply some grouping in the layout, on Location: So far so good, nothing really difficult…

Tip of the day: Have you checked out the new #BCALhelp hashtag? Remember that you can use it to ask questions directly to the #MSDyn365BC community. There’s already a lot of informative discussions going on:

When you use the Power BI Desktop connector for Business Central: you will see all your environments (production, sandboxes,…): And if you try this in the latest version, with the new look & feel, you will see something like this: Nice to see an idea implemented ! https://t.co/W1AO5qrZMI #msdyn365bc #PowerBI pic.twitter.com/YSCNKTFBUu — Steven Renders (@srenders) November 15, 2019 How cool is that! Thanks Microsoft for implementing this idea: https://experience.dynamics.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=29d8a705-2d8c-e911-80e7-0003ff68d305

Imagine you accidentally delete your launch.json file in your project, or you clone a git repo that does not have a launch.json file, then what do you do? Do you manually create a new launch.json file? Do you copy a launch.json file from another project? Do you go to #bcalhelp and ask for help? These are all good solutions, but did you know that VSCode can create it for you, automatically? Let me show you how: How cool is that? And a tip from Waldo : (simply download symbols, without a launch.json)

Since the release of the new development environment, some thing have changed… And one of these things is how you, as a developer, run a query. Imagine you have created this amazing query object: Well, in the past you could have simply used Ctrl+R or the Run button in the object designer, to get a preview of the first 10.000 rows, but now you can’t run a query object anymore, from VSCode, or can you? Ofcourse you can. Simply deploy your extension to your sandbox and then append the following in the URL: https://businesscentral.dynamics.com/[REPLACE-WITH-YOUR-TENTNANT-ID]/Sandbox?query…

I recently was made aware that you can simply unzip the Microsoft Base Application, after you download symbols: How cool is that? (I knew that this was possible with your own apps, I simply did not know it was possible with the Microsoft Apps too.)