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The Dynamics NAV ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live Dynamics NAV data, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Dynamics NAV like you would a database - read, write, and update Items, Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Build Dashboards with Dynamics NAV Data in Dundas BI


Create dynamic dashboards and perform analytics based on Dynamics NAV data in Dundas BI.

The CData ODBC Driver for Dynamics NAV enables access to live data from Dynamics NAV under the ODBC standard, allowing you work with Dynamics NAV data in a wide variety of BI, reporting, and ETL tools and directly, using familiar SQL queries. This article shows how to connect to Dynamics NAV data as a generic ODBC Data Provider and create charts, reports, and dashboards based on Dynamics NAV data in Dundas BI.

Connect to Dynamics NAV Data

  1. If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can configure the DSN using the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the Help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.

    Before you can connect, OData Services will need to be enabled on the server. Once OData Services are enabled, you will be able to query any Services that are published on the server.

    The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, must be set to valid Dynamics NAV user credentials. In addition, you will need to specify a URL to a valid Dynamics NAV server organization root and a ServerInstance. If there is not a Service Default Company for the server, you will need to set the Company as well.

    When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

  2. Open the Dundas BI interface, open the menu, and click New Data Connector.
  3. Configure the Dundas BI Data Connector:
    • Name the Data Connector.
    • Select "ODBC generic" as the Data Provider.
    • Check the "Use System DSN" checkbox.
    • Select the appropriate System DSN.

Add Dynamics NAV Data to a Dashboard

You are now ready to create a dashboard with Dynamics NAV data.

  1. Navigate to the Home page.
  2. Click Explore Data.
  3. Expand the appropriate Data Connector.
  4. Drag the relevant data from the Connector to the panel.
    • You can select an entire "table" to add, but you may need to remove Measures/Rows from the Metric Set to build an appropriate visualization. Alternatively, you can select only the fields you wish to include in the visualization.
    • With the fields selected, you can add any filters or conditions on the Measures and Rows, further customizing the visualization.
  5. Click Re-visualize from the menu bar and select the appropriate visualization for the data.
  6. Click Add To New Dashboard to add the visualization to a new dashboard.
  7. Configure the dashboard, creating dynamic visualizations of Dynamics NAV data.