Connecting to Business Central webservice - unchecked fields load anyway

[kris10]

In Business Central I added a new webservice of type page. When setting up the webservice in BC, you have the possibility to uncheck fields that you don't want to be loaded in Power BI i.e. for performance reasons.

When I connect in Power BI to the webservice, all fields are loaded anyway, the checked ones and the unchecked ones.

Business Central Online is in version 25.0. How can I manage in the webservice not to load all fields in Power BI but only the ones I need? What is the puprose then of checking/unchecking fields in the webservice?

[kris10]

Hi @rajendraongole1 and thx for your quick reply and the information about the cause. The only disadvantage of removing fields in PowerQuery is that sometimes on new releases of Business Central, some fields do not exist anymore and if you have removed them in PowerQuery, the script will give an error because referring to an unexisting field. 

Kind Regards.

[rajendraongole1 · Accepted solution]

Hi @kris10 - Great questio, . The issue you're experiencing in Business Central when creating a web service for Power BI and not seeing the field selection respected typically arises from the way the OData Web Services are handled in Power BI and Business Central.

To resolve this in Power BI and load only the required fields, you need to take control at the Power Query level. Here are the steps:

Option 1: Filter Columns in Power Query
In Power BI, after connecting to the OData feed:

Go to Home > Transform Data to open Power Query Editor.
In Power Query Editor:

Select only the columns you need by unchecking unnecessary columns.
Go to Home > Choose Columns and manually select the required fields.
This reduces the data model size and improves performance, as only the necessary columns will be loaded into your dataset.

Click Close & Apply to save the changes.

useful resource:

OData Web Services - Business Central | Microsoft Learn