Integrating Business Central with Dataverse

If you are adopting the Microsoft Business Applications ecosystem, you are likely in search of a streamlined user experience. Ideally, there is little effort involved in integrating first-party apps. We are a Microsoft Business Central Gold Partner, and we aim to architect experiences like this. How? We use Microsoft’s own Power Platform as the overlaying technology.

The following instructions summarize and compare your options when integrating with Dataverse.

Dataverse from the Microsoft Power Platform is where integrations should be centralized. Getting data from Business Central into Dataverse is the first step.

Currently, there are 4 available options to integrating Business Central with Dataverse. Below are the comparison of these options and which option we deemed best.

The Out-of-the-box Business Central Connector

This connector is easy to implement but quickly becomes unusable as it doesn’t support delegation.

Bi-directional Integration with Tables in Dataverse

This option is packaged solution from Microsoft. Additional tables are created in Dataverse. Frequent synchronization occurs from Business Central tables to these Dataverse tables. Upserts in the Dataverse tables are written back to Business Central tables.

This is a great OOTB configurable feature if there is no real-time synchronization requirement.

Updates may require up to 15 minutes delay. Additionally the creating of tables in your Dataverse database increases consumption.

For more information, click here.

Business Central Integration with Virtual Tables in Dataverse

This option is a packaged solution from Microsoft. Additional tables are created as in the above example. They operate with bi-directional integration as well. However, they are virtual tables so capacity is less of a concern. Additionally, the Virtual Table integration is real-time.

This is a great option that works well with Model-driven Apps. However, for Canvas Apps, relationships between Parent-Child tables like Sales Invoice and Sales Invoice Lines does not work.

Child records cannot be filtered down to only those associated to a Parent record.

See more about:

Microsoft App Source

Documentation Overview

Instructions

Business Central Integration – Creating your Own Custom Connector

This option involves creating our own Custom Connector. Leveraging the out of the box Business Central capabilities to expose web services on specific tables, we generated a Custom Connector that can be leveraged in Canvas Apps and Power Automate.

This option provided real-time access to data in both Dataverse and Business Central. It doesn’t create additional space consumption in Dataverse. Although the development was greater it quickly has become the go-to for the mechanism that is foundational to this stream-lined experience.

This blog is part 1 of 3 of a series on creating a merged experience between Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Business Central. The 3-part blogs can be found here:

1. Integrating Business Central with Dataverse
2. Building a Business Central Connector
3. Merging the Customer Engagement and Business Central Experience

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Article by: Valter Herman and Derek Finlinson

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