Getting Onboard with Power Platform as a Business Central Developer

Intro

One of the things that I wanted to come away with from Directions EMEA last week was a better overview of the Power Platform. What is it? What can we do with it? When should we use it? How does it fit into the overall solutions that we are designing for our Business Central customers?

If you’re anything like me then you’ve been aware that you need to get on the Power Platform train at some point – but you haven’t been quite sure how or when. You’ve been watching suspiciously from the platform wondering where this train even goes, how it gets there and how much a ticket costs. On closer inspection, it looks like the train is already full of consultants and citizen developers digitally transforming each other…*shudder*

Still, we can’t put it off forever. If Microsoft are to be believed then the vast majority of customisations in the future are going to be developed in low-code platforms.

Good news for me was that there was more Power Platform content at Directions than you could shake two sticks at. I still have some questions about how to manage Power Platform development as part of our Business Central solutions, but I’ve come away more convinced that it is going to be an important part in the future and an inclination to get on board.

Series

I haven’t been blogging for a while because, life, but I thought it might be interesting to blog my way through my Power Platform learning curve. Hopefully you’ll find something useful but at the very least you’ll be able to laugh at my fumbling attempts to make sense of it all.

Flow from Business Central

I’m going to start with something that was demoed by Microsoft in one of the Directions keynotes that struck me as very significant. We can trigger a Power Automate flow from an action on a page in Business Central.

But couldn’t we do that before? Yes, we’ve been able to trigger a flow with an HTTP trigger and call the URL from an action on a page, for example. What’s different now is that you can add a new action to specific tables and/or pages in Business Central, with some UI, to trigger a flow for a given record without any AL development.

Maybe you’re thrilled by the possibilities that this opens up. Finally you are not so dependent on developers to get stuff done. Or maybe you are horrified that anyone can add an action to a page without building an extension, adding the code to source control, running a pipeline or any tests.

I’ll show some examples and explore the possibilities next time…