The comprehensive guide to using Business Central Excel Report Metadata with refreshable APIs

April 30, 2024November 23, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP6 Comments

Excel Reports are extremely useful when you need a detailed dataset. They not only provide a denormalized dataset, but also facilitate the creation of meaningful data connections, pivot charts, visualizations and more. A notable drawback has been the cumbersome process of generating an Excel Report from Business Central. This involves running a report request page, downloading the file, then opening and enabling the workbook before you can access any data. Moreover, once the report is generated, you are left with a static dataset that lacks a refresh option. This means the data remains unchanged from the moment the report was run.

In Business Central 23.3 we were given the ability to create refreshable datasets by calling Business Central APIs from within Excel. Here is a deep dive into how you can create a refreshable Excel Report Layout — all you need is a Business Central API and a Report.

[NOTE]: This blog post was written before the release of BC25 (2024 release wave 2). Extensive improvements have been made to make connecting to APIs through Excel Report Layouts easier. So if you are working with BC25, please check out this blog post

CanGrow Property on Reports

March 13, 2024March 12, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

When working with RDLC report layouts, there are many different properties available to aide in customization. This blog post will focus on CanGrow and how we can use it to expand to display all of its contents, or restrict its size.

Labels in Business Central Development

February 28, 2024September 16, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP2 Comments

Labels are string constants that can be translated into multiple languages. They can be used for things like captions, descriptions, questions, error messages, or other text constants. Labels have a specific syntax, which includes a text constant, followed by three optional parameters.

Parameter	Type	Description
Comment	Text	Used for general comments about the label, specifically giving details about the placeholders in the label.
Locked	Boolean	When Locked is set to true, the label shouldn’t be translated. The default value is false.
MaxLength	Integer	Determines how much of the label is used. If no maximum length is specified, the string can be any length.

Working with the Date table in Business Central

January 17, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP1 Comment

If you are working with reports that need to display dates in chronological order, you might be tempted to create a separate table just for that purpose. For example you might want to show the actual and planned production output for each day, week, month, quarter, year, etc. However, creating and maintaining such a table can be tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, there is a better way to handle dates in Business Central.

🎃Trick or Treat with AI 👻

November 2, 2023November 4, 2023 Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Mary Myers, MVP and Chief Maximizer at WorldMax to start teaching her some of the basics of AL Development within VS Code. Any time you get to chat with Mary is a treat, especially when you get to share your love of developing for Business Central. Mary knows Business Central business logic, and she’s a sorceress when it comes to Power Platform integrations, but she is not an AL developer. Throughout her day to day work she’s improved her productivity by leveraging AI, so before our meeting she asked ChatGPT for some help. Mary knew enough technical lingo to formulate the following question:

Get Started Developing for BC: Docker Containers

September 25, 2023November 5, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP3 Comments

Docker is a platform for developing, shipping and running applications inside of containers. A container is a lightweight, portable and self-sufficient environment that isolates applications to ensure that they run consistently throughout the development lifecycle. Docker containers are used by a wide variety of software developers because they can isolate their development environment from the host system, which prevents conflicts with other software or system configurations. What this means is we can work in an environment tailored specifically to Business Central Development that we know will be consistent.

BC Development Notebook

Notes by Tonya Bricco-Meske

Tag: Development