Ben Cole and Dave Wheat approached to develop an AI demonstration for generating marketing campaigns based on regional sales in Business Central. The system identifies relevant postal codes using natural language input, integrating two AI agents to process information efficiently. This approach optimizes cost and enhances user interaction while managing campaigns seamlessly.

Lab Notes #3 There have been a few instances where I wanted to start development on a Business Central extension, but the client system isn't ready. You need to download Business Central symbols, so where do you go? I could go grab symbols from another project or point to another Business Central environment. There is another option in Business Central AL 17.0: You can download symbols from the Global NuGet feeds.

The post discusses troubleshooting Business Event Subscriptions in Business Central, following Tonya Bricco-Meske's insights on hidden Event Subscription Pages. It highlights essential pages for debugging, including the Business Event Subscriptions, Activity Log, and Notifications pages, providing users with tools to resolve issues when subscribing to events.

In 2025, I connected with the Business Central community through events, podcasts, and panels, sharing knowledge and fostering discussions on relevant topics. My blog, Aardvark Labs, exceeded expectations with over 2200 monthly views. Exciting plans for 2026 include more blog posts, video series, and a special Dynamics Con event.

The post discusses handling two clients with similar requirements, one using an optional third-party extension, Binary Stream Multi-Entity Management. It explains a procedure for creating General Journals while selectively interacting with extension fields. The code checks for the extension's installation, ensuring compatibility without creating dependencies, enabling flexible system functioning.

The post discusses the use of XML, specifically cXML, in data exchange within Business Central. It highlights the challenges of strict adherence to XML standards compared to more flexible formats like JSON. The author then provides a parsed example of a cXML purchase order, detailing the process of extracting information from the XML structure.

This post elaborates on importing multi-tab Excel data into Business Central, specifically focusing on a Header/Line relationship. It uses Sales Header and Detail tables, employing a dictionary to manage connections between headers and lines, ensuring efficient data linking during the import. The example showcases methods for parsing Excel files seamlessly.

Wishing everyone a joyful Thanksgiving from my family to yours!

In this Business Central AL Journey installment, the author introduces Custom Controls for data input and display, emphasizing the use of JavaScript and HTML5. The new User Control Host page type enables embedding web pages, such as Power BI reports, into Business Central, providing a foundational step toward developing custom controls for enhanced user interaction.

Business Central offers tools to secure sensitive data, including Secret Text and Isolated Storage. The recent update, Business Central 27.1, introduces the Concealed Text Field, enabling masked input for sensitive entries to enhance privacy. This feature is easily activated in the Feature Management page and applies to various field types.

The codeunit 457 "Environment Information" in Business Central helps manage extension behavior based on the environment type. It includes functions like IsProduction and IsSandbox to determine the environment and adjust operations accordingly, such as altering email procedures for Sandbox environments and handling SaaS versus OnPremises distinctions effectively.

A client requires enhanced service technician notes for customer-facing invoices in Business Central. The solution involves employing CoPilot to transform these notes into clear summaries. This implementation includes creating a table for resolution notes and integrating prompts for user input, ultimately streamlining the invoice generation and improving client communication.

In a previous post we reviewed the Type Helper Code Unit and its collection of useful procedures. There are several other helper code units, and this week we will review the String Conversion Management Code Unit. If you haven't seen the post about the Type Helper, you can find it here: This particular helper stems from the .NET System.Text objects.

The Page Scripting tool has been improved in Business Central 2025 Wave 2, addressing key challenges. Users can now delete steps, insert new ones without re-recording, rearrange steps via drag and drop, add parameters through the UI, and utilize previously generated scripts, making the scripting process more user-friendly and efficient.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Release Wave 2 (Version 27.0) introduces a new, more efficient way to delete large volumes of data: Truncate. My first question is, how much faster is it? I setup a little experiment. I created a routine to generate 500,000 records. Which took 127,676 millisecond or about 2 minutes. I then deleted the records in one of three different ways.

The Type Helper code unit in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central encapsulates reusable logic for tasks like data formatting, localization, and type conversion. With 74 procedures, it simplifies common operations in development, facilitating API handling. The helper enhances modularity and efficiency by offloading routine functionality to callable units.

The content discusses the importance of keeping sensitive data secret while developing extensions for Business Central, particularly in relation to Azure OpenAI and API keys. It introduces the SecretText variable, which protects confidential information from debuggers and other users. The implementation includes generating JSON objects securely with secret values.

The post discusses two authentication methods for integrating AI in Business Central: using an Azure OpenAI instance or a Managed OpenAI Resource. While the Azure instance provides control over model deployment, the Managed Resource reduces costs and maintenance since it's included in Business Central. The Managed Resource also offers Grounded Bing Search capabilities, but comes with data containment concerns.

Earlier in our Delimited File Import example we imported and parsed a simple file into Customer records. While useful, there are many cases where a Header and Line system is required, such as Sales Orders. We are going to use concepts from that earlier post, so please take a moment and review if needed. There are two common structures for storing header and line data in a delimited file.

BC AL Journey #31 Pages and Page Extensions are a great way to create or update page layouts for Business Central. The issues are that they are "one size fits all", meaning that they are perfect for nobody. What is needed is a page layout that can be customized based on a user or more specifically a user profile. What we need is to be able to do is define a profile, then define customization to pages that are specific to that profile.

As of the writing of this the Business Central 2027 release wave 1 is 18+ months away, however the scope of this change leaves no time to waste. Currently in Business Central any Page can be a Web Service. You can use the magnifying glass, enter Web Services, and see a list of available Web Services. You can see the Customer Card API is a Page with the object ID of 21.

Address matching can be challenging due to various abbreviations and misspellings. The writer discusses integrating artificial intelligence to improve accuracy, utilizing tools like Azure OpenAI to evaluate address similarities. The system should return the closest matching address with a certainty percentage, aiding in data completeness within Business Central records.

Microsoft Excel is the leading data management application, widely used despite mixed opinions. The content discusses importing data into a temporary staging table using Excel files. It outlines steps to define columns, manage item records, and implement the import process with specific procedures for handling Excel data, ensuring clarity and efficiency.

Delimited files, commonly used for data transfer, separate data with various delimiters (e.g., CSV, pipe). These files are unstructured and flat, lacking validation between records. Implementing a temporary staging table ensures data integrity during customer imports. The process involves uploading a file, parsing, and storing customer records systematically for further processing.

In the remote working environment, video calls enhance participant engagement. Using OBS Studio can improve the video appearance during meetings. By configuring video and audio sources, adding images, and utilizing a green screen for better background removal, users can personalize their virtual presence. Activating the virtual camera finalizes the setup.