Enabling Power BI integration with Business Central

Article
04/24/2024

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This article describes how to get Business Central ready for integration with Power BI. Business Central online is already enabled for integration, although there's some information about licensing that you might want to read. For Business Central on-premises, you'll have set up your environment to connect to Power BI before users can work with it.

Power BI Licensing

With Business Central, users get a free Power BI license that provides access to the most common features in Business Central and Power BI. You can also purchase a Power BI Pro license that provides access to additional features. The following table provides an overview of the features available with each license.

Power License	View reports	Create reports	Share reports	Refresh reports	Business Central Apps
Power BI free			(limited)	(limited)
Power BI Pro				(extensive)

For more information, see Licensing the Power BI service for users in your organization or Sign up for the Power BI service as an individual.

Expose data through API or OData web services

Business Central offers two ways to expose data that can be consumed by Power BI reports: API pages or queries, and Open Data Protocol (OData) web services.

API pages and queries

APPLIES TO: Business Central online only

Developers can define page objects and query objects that are of the type API. This way, they can expose data from database tables through a webhook-supported, OData v4-enabled, REST service. This type of data can't be displayed in the user interface, but is intended for building reliable integration services.

Business Central online comes available with a set of built-in APIs, which you can use to get data for the most common business entities, like customers, items, sales orders, and more. No extra work or setup is required to use these APIs as a data source for Power BI reports. For more information about these APIs, see Business Central API V2.0.

Business Central online also supports custom APIs. Application developers of Business Central solutions can create their own API pages and queries and package them into apps. You then install the apps on your tenant. Once installed, you use the API pages for your Power BI reports, like you'd do with the built-in APIs (v2.0). For more information about how to create an API by exposing pages or queries, see Developing a Custom API.

Important

Starting in February 2022, Power BI reports for Business Central online are sourced from a secondary, read-only database replica for performance reasons. As a consequence, AL developers should avoid designing API pages that make database modifications while the pages are opening or loading records. In particular, consider the code on the AL triggers: OnInit, OnOpenPage, OnFindRecord, OnNextRecord, OnAfterGetRecord, and OnAfterGetCurrRecord. These database modifications, in some cases, may cause performance problems and prevent the report from refreshing data. For more information, see Performance Articles For Developers in the Business Central development content.

In rare cases, the behavior will cause an error when a user tries get data from the API for a report in Power BI Desktop. However, if database modifications are necessary in the custom API, Power BI Desktop users can force the behavior. For more information, see Building Power BI Reports to Display Business Central Data.

OData web services

You can publish Business Central application objects, like codeunits, page, and queries, as OData web services. With Business Central online, there are many web services published by default. An easy way to find the web services is to search for web services in Business Central. In the Web Services page, make sure the Publish field is selected for the web services listed above. For more information about publishing web services, see Publish a Web Service.

To learn about what you can do to ensure the best performance of web services, as seen from the Business Central server (the endpoint) and from the consumer (the client), read Writing efficient Web Services.

Choosing whether to use API pages or OData web services

Whenever possible, you're encouraged to use API pages instead of OData web service. API pages are faster at loading data in Power BI reports than OData web services. Plus, they're more flexible because they let you get data from table fields that aren't defined in a page object.

Setting up Dataflows

Dataflows enable you to ingest, transform, and load data into a Power BI workspace and then use the data as the basis for your reports. These dataflows can in some cases experience transient errors while doing a scheduled refresh. The error message looks like this: DataSource.Error: OData: Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.

Using PowerAutomate, you can set up retries for this situation. For more information, see Automatically retry a dataflow on failure.

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