The comprehensive guide to using Business Central Excel Report Metadata with refreshable APIs

April 30, 2024April 30, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske2 Comments

Excel Reports are extremely useful when you need a detailed dataset. They not only provide a denormalized dataset, but also facilitate the creation of meaningful data connections, pivot charts, visualizations and more. A notable drawback has been the cumbersome process of generating an Excel Report from Business Central. This involves running a report request page, downloading the file, then opening and enabling the workbook before you can access any data. Moreover, once the report is generated, you are left with a static dataset that lacks a refresh option. This means the data remains unchanged from the moment the report was run.

In Business Central 23.3 we were given the ability to create refreshable datasets by calling Business Central APIs from within Excel. Here is a deep dive into how you can create a refreshable Excel Report Layout — all you need is a Business Central API and a Report.

CanGrow Property on Reports

March 13, 2024March 12, 2024 Tonya Bricco-MeskeLeave a comment

When working with RDLC report layouts, there are many different properties available to aide in customization. This blog post will focus on CanGrow and how we can use it to expand to display all of its contents, or restrict its size.

Labels in Business Central Development

February 28, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske1 Comment

Labels are string constants that can be translated into multiple languages. They can be used for things like captions, descriptions, questions, error messages, or other text constants. Labels have a specific syntax, which includes a text constant, followed by three optional parameters.

Parameter	Type	Description
Comment	Text	Used for general comments about the label, specifically giving details about the placeholders in the label.
Locked	Boolean	When Locked is set to true, the label shouldn’t be translated. The default value is false.
MaxLength	Integer	Determines how much of the label is used. If no maximum length is specified, the string can be any length.

Working with the Date table in Business Central

January 17, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske1 Comment

If you are working with reports that need to display dates in chronological order, you might be tempted to create a separate table just for that purpose. For example you might want to show the actual and planned production output for each day, week, month, quarter, year, etc. However, creating and maintaining such a table can be tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, there is a better way to handle dates in Business Central.

Contributing to Microsoft Docs for Business Central

December 14, 2023 Tonya Bricco-MeskeLeave a comment

After writing my last blog post BC23 Rich Text content on Reports I was asked if I would consider doing a small pull request to the Microsoft Learn docs article that details how to use rich text content on RDL report layouts for Business Central. The process itself was pretty easy, so I wanted to share how you too can improve the Business Central documentation and contribute.

BC23 Rich Text content on Reports

November 28, 2023January 15, 2024 Tonya Bricco-Meske3 Comments

My most recent project has large footers being added to the bottom of their reports to display Terms and Conditions. This is something fairly common that is requested, and I’ve always shied away from hard-coding anything inside the report layout. If an address changes, then they have to get a developer involved to change the text vs being able to modify it themselves on a setup page. You could use a blob field to store all of the Terms and Conditions, but then you had no way to format a giant block of text, until now. ✨Business Central version 23 now has the power of leveraging the built-in rich text editor, and we can display that formatted text on our reports (with a few gotchas).

BC Development Notebook

Notes by Tonya Bricco-Meske