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Get the Report →Build Dashboards with Dynamics 365 Business Central Data in Dundas BI
Create dynamic dashboards and perform analytics based on Dynamics 365 Business Central data in Dundas BI.
The CData ODBC Driver for Dynamics 365 Business Central enables access to live data from Dynamics 365 Business Central under the ODBC standard, allowing you work with Dynamics 365 Business Central 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 365 Business Central data as a generic ODBC Data Provider and create charts, reports, and dashboards based on Dynamics 365 Business Central data in Dundas BI.
Connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central Data
- 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.
To authenticate to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must provide the User and AccessKey properties.
To obtain the User and AccessKey values, navigate to the Users page in Dynamics 365 Business Central and then click on Edit. The User Name and Web Service Access Key values are what you will enter as the User and AccessKey connection string properties. Note that the User Name is not your email address. It is a shortened user name.
To connect to data, specify OrganizationUrl. If you have multiple companies in your organization, you must also specify the Company to indicate which company you would like to connect to. Company does not need to be specified if you have only one company.
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.
- Open the Dundas BI interface, open the menu, and click New Data Connector.
- 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 365 Business Central Data to a Dashboard
You are now ready to create a dashboard with Dynamics 365 Business Central data.
- Navigate to the Home page.
- Click Explore Data.
- Expand the appropriate Data Connector.
- 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.
- Click Re-visualize from the menu bar and select the appropriate visualization for the data.
- Click Add To New Dashboard to add the visualization to a new dashboard.
- Configure the dashboard, creating dynamic visualizations of Dynamics 365 Business Central data.