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Dynamics 365 Business Central (NAV) Icon Dynamics 365 Business Central ODBC Driver

The Dynamics 365 Business Central ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live Dynamics 365 Business Central data, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Dynamics 365 Business Central 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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Analyze Dynamics 365 Business Central Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze Dynamics 365 Business Central data in Microsoft R Open.

Access Dynamics 365 Business Central data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Dynamics 365 Business Central and the RODBC package to work with remote Dynamics 365 Business Central data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to Dynamics 365 Business Central data and visualize Dynamics 365 Business Central data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to Dynamics 365 Business Central follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

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.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for Dynamics 365 Business Central in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData D365BusinessCentral Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Dynamics 365 Business Central Description = My Description OrganizationUrl = https://myaccount.financials.dynamics.com/

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData D365BusinessCentral Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Dynamics 365 Business Central API.

accounts <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT accountid, Name FROM Accounts", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(accounts)

Plot Dynamics 365 Business Central Data

You can now analyze Dynamics 365 Business Central data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(accounts$Name, main="Dynamics 365 Business Central Accounts", names.arg = accounts$accountid, horiz=TRUE)