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Dynamics 365 Community / Blogs / Josh Anglesea D365BC Blog / Business Central with Power...

Business Central with Power BI streaming dataset ♒︎

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JAngle Profile Picture JAngle 133

An acquaintance got in touch with me recently telling me about an app they have released. I liked what I saw but mainly because it alerted me to a Power BI feature I didn’t know about. It is worth checking out the details on appsource, mostly because it has a great video. The video contains an explanation of both the value add from the app but how to setup a Power BI streaming dataset: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/dynamics-365-business-central/PUBID.wyellc1666343906172%7CAID.snap%7CPAPPID.64cefe50-3740-4686-ad5a-50f648bbb7c8?tab=Overview

There are some good blogs which explain the creation process at greater length than I will cover. Once you have a streaming dataset created you can configure it to expect some columns and you get a API endpoint. You can see an example JSON body to pass to it as well. Power BI pro licenses are needed as a minimum with this:

All this is great but what does it mean for BC!!?? Well if you have a scenario where data from BC needs to be visualized without refreshing/scheduling then this is a nice option. KPI’s for a contact centre, warehouse, shopfloor are possible things to explore. How can we get data pushed? The most obvious contender is of course Power Automate.

I’m using a manual trigger but this could be based on a scheduled cloud flow. My example is simple and I will generate one variable but for more data points a JSON object or array might be more suitable
Use the find records feature of the BC connector and pick a datasource with the necessary filters
That will produce a dataset which you can then iterate through to fill the earlier created variable
Choose the PBI connector and add rows to a dataset
When generating a dashboard in PBI you can choose the streaming data as a tile
Soon as data is sent the tile will be updated!
It is possible to use it in reports too and you get a complete dataset with each of the pushes. Hence, why I think it is sensible to include a date field
The updating isn’t as neat like the dashboard tile. If you refresh the browser it will have the data though.

I’ve chosen Power Automate to reflect how quickly using only out of the box you can get going with this. With some other data sources the results could be interesting. Maybe even having pushes direct from BC using triggers in AL


This was originally posted here.

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