Business Central Data Dictionary

JAngle

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I’ve been asked about this topic a few times recently, by colleagues and customers – where do I get a Business Central data dictionary or database schema from? This is a very brief post on how I tackled this. My default answer has typically been Jet Reports because the sample reports come with one. You don’t need Jet Reports to have access to it. Just go to the website and download it – https://insightsoftware.com/sample-reports/data-dictionary/. It is saved in such a way that it is just a plain Excel file, and looks much like this:

This could fulfill your needs perfectly well, however you can’t refresh it, unless you have Jet Reports. What if you have custom tables or tables from appsource extensions? Is there another free method to get hold of the database tables and fields? For this we will use a Power BI report. Big caveat is that we will need to customise the system ever so slightly. There are two ways you can go here. Either create API pages (best practice) or create standard list page objects. I did both and oddly had much faster results from the none API pages – weird . To the extent I built my below sample from the standard list pages:

Something along these lines could be the final result. The PBIX I have created is also available to try out if you don’t want to build the pages or use the Jet Report suggestion.

I have taken complete inspiration from the Jet Report example and created pages in the report based on theirs.

This is just a small subset of what could be generated from the these two system tables.

Code for the two pages (in both styles) and the PBIX I took the screen grabs from are available on GitHub here: https://github.com/JAng13sea/Blogs/tree/master/Data%20Dictionary

How is the Power BI option free? The entry level account is free: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics365/business-central/admin-powerbi-setup and that is all I had to build the report.

This was originally posted here.