Getting to Know Business Central APIs

In this chapter, we will introduce Business Central Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs are a core piece of integrating with any system, and Business Central is no different. It is common when discussing integrating solutions with Business Central to ask what APIs are available to connect to pull data from another system. It is important to understand this concept, as it relates to the Power Platform. You will use APIs in many of the examples we have in this book to build solutions.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

• An introduction to Business Central APIs
• How to access Business Central APIs
• What are the limits of working with APIs?
• Tips for working with APIs

Technical requirements

Here is the link for the Postman environment: https://www.postman.com/downloads/.

You can download the Power BI Desktop from here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/.

An introduction to Business Central APIs

In this section, we will learn more about Business Central APIs and what they are. This knowledge is essential when we talk about building solutions that are low code or no code and connect to Business Central.

Microsoft provides APIs out of the box to extend Business Central, which allows you to interact with Business Central functionalities. These are built on ODATA web services that allow you to build solutions to call restful APIs. In Business Central, you can create new APIs that call a Query or Page object. We will explore how to do this in the next section.

APIs allow you to read, create and update data in the following ways:

• To get data: Send a GET request to the API URL
• To create new records: Use a POST method
• To update a record: Use a PUT method
• To delete a record: Use a DELETE method

The APIs out of the box cover several areas across Business Central, such as Finance, Sales, Customers, Items, and Purchasing...

How to connect to Business Central APIs

In the previous chapter, we explored one way of connecting to the APIs in Business Central. In this section, we will focus on Postman. Postman offers multiple advantages to access Business Central APIs. It provides a user-friendly interface that simplifies API testing, allowing you to easily set up and execute requests. With built-in authentication support, you can seamlessly authorize your requests using various methods. Postman’s request-building capabilities and parameterization options make it easy to handle complex API requests, while its organization and history features help you effectively manage your requests. You can automate testing and generate documentation, making collaboration smoother. Additionally, Postman assists in monitoring, debugging, and sharing API collections, making it a valuable tool to work with Business Central APIs. The following is a high-level overview of the steps:

1. Install Postman.
2. Set up a...

What are the limits of working with APIs?

We’ve talked a lot about connecting to APIs, and we’ve even done it using a couple of different tools. What we haven’t really discussed is what the limits of APIs are. The benefits of using an API to connect our solutions to Business Central are very exciting, and you will be tempted to use it for everything. However, with great power comes great responsibility.

There are limits to working with APIs and Business Central that we must consider. These are spelled out in detail in the terms of use for APIs, but we’ll talk about a couple of the critical ones to keep in mind when creating solutions to use APIs.

The first one to keep in mind is API availability and limits. Microsoft sets limits on the amount of data and the number of requests you can send and receive through an API. Business Central is a cloud environment, and as such, Microsoft must ensure that no one client uses too many resources. When you build...

Tips and tricks to work with APIs and Business Central

There are several things you can do to make your life easier when you work with APIs in Business Central, and they are the things to be careful with. Performance is the biggest concern you will have when you work with APIs. Since this is a low-code and no-code book, I won’t list the ones that have to do with programming and building an API from scratch. However, you can read about them in the same URL provided in the previous More information on Business Central note box.

Resources to create APIs

There are limitations to what you can do with existing APIs and a low-code or no-code approach to creating solutions. There will be times when you need a custom API. To learn more about that, I recommend Mastering Dynamics 355 Business Central, a book by Stefano Demiliani.

To improve the performance of your solutions when working with APIs, do some of the following:

• Make sure you monitor your Power Platform solutions...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about APIs and Business Central. We learned how to access APIs using different tools available to us, such as Postman and Power BI. We also created an Azure AD application, a Business Central Azure AD application, and Postman to successfully execute GET requests to return information from APIs. We also looked at some of the limitations of APIs and what you need to know when working with them. Performance is one of the biggest concerns you will have to take into account when working with APIs. In the next chapter, we will explore connecting to Business Central APIs as part of different solutions.