dynamics 365 business central support Fabric shortcuts

[sgol]

hi, does dynamics 365 business central support Fabric shortcuts. I dont see any guidance here .. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/admin-fabric ... 

It is not super clear here. Appreciate your help

Also, if you could recommend what is the best way to bring data from Business Central to Fabric that wil be awesome.

I see bc2adls is not supported anymore. what if I want to bring this data into one lake? what is suggested. both historical and also incremental as well. 

[sgol]

hi, thanks for the update. we are falling back to OData approach. we have developed user queries within BC and exposing it thru OData today. We did not wanted to do Dataverse route as this mean managing the mapping b/w BC and Dataverse and re-engineering the queries. at some point we hope there is a native integration b/w BC 365 and Fabric.

Thanks for the help.

[v-tejrama · Accepted solution]

Hi @sgol ,

Thank you for providing the update. Your decision to use the OData approach is well justified, as it aligns with best practices commonly adopted by teams working with Business Central, particularly when established user queries exist and minimizing additional work is a priority. OData offers a reliable and supported method for extracting data, and with careful design, it can serve as a robust long-term solution for both historical and incremental data transfers into Fabric.

To ensure your implementation remains efficient and sustainable, it is important to optimize your queries and manage incremental data effectively. Business Central’s OData endpoints support server driven paging via the nextLink token, which helps prevent data loss or duplication. For incremental refresh, including a last modified or timestamp field in your queries allows your Fabric Data Pipeline or Dataflow to filter updated records.

If this is not feasible for certain tables, Business Central’s change log entries can be used to track updates and deletions, supporting both full history and incremental updates in your Fabric Lakehouse.

While OData is suitable for moderate data volumes, be mindful of potential growth, as you may need to implement throttling and retry logic to comply with Business Central’s API limits. Using service principal authentication with appropriate permissions will also help ensure secure and unattended pipeline operations.

Once your data is in OneLake, you can transform and store it in delta or parquet formats for use within Fabric.

Your interest in a more direct integration between Business Central and Fabric is shared by many, and Microsoft currently recommends using Dataverse or API-based extraction until native integration is available. The documentation you referenced

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/admin-fabric will be updated as new capabilities are released, so monitoring that page is advisable.

In summary, your OData solution is well-structured and should remain effective as long as your queries and pipelines are properly maintained, providing a stable connection between Business Central and Fabric until a native connector is introduced.

Thank you.

[v-tejrama]

Hi @sgol ,

I wanted to follow up and see if you had a chance to review the information shared. If you have any further questions or need additional assistance, feel free to reach out.

Thank you.

[v-tejrama]

Hi @sgol ,

Thank you for your question. Currently, Dynamics 365 Business Central does not natively support the creation of Microsoft Fabric shortcuts. Fabric shortcuts act as logical pointers in OneLake to data sources like Dataverse or Azure Data Lake Storage; however, Business Central does not expose its data in a format compatible with Fabric shortcuts at this time.

The recommended and supported method is to integrate Business Central with Dataverse. This integration allows you to synchronize tables and data, making it possible to either create Fabric shortcuts to Dataverse tables or use Fabric Data Pipelines or Dataflows Gen2 to transfer data into a Fabric Lakehouse. This approach offers flexibility for referencing data through shortcuts or managing historical and incremental updates using pipelines.

As the bc2adls connector is no longer supported, utilizing Dataverse is now the primary and supported method for bringing Business Central data into Fabric. This ensures your data in OneLake remains current and accessible for analysis.

Best Regards,
Tejaswi.
Community Support

[v-tejrama]

Hi @sgol ,

I wanted to follow up and see if you had a chance to review the information shared. If you have any further questions or need additional assistance, feel free to reach out.

Thank you.