Alright, now we're getting into one of my favorite sections of the book! In this chapter, we're going to take a look at some of the ways that we can interact with Business Central from outside of Business Central. First, we'll look at how web services can be published in Business Central, which is critical for surfacing data to external applications and services. Next, we'll move on to one of the newest platforms available in Business Central, the Business Central API. This is a new RESTful web service platform that will allow you to consume and create data in Business Central using standard API calls.
Moving on from the API, we get into the Power Platform. This super cool collection of Microsoft online services and applications puts a lot of...power...into your hands.
Once we finish with Power Platform, we'll look at Azure Functions. They provide us with a way to deploy serverless .NET applications to the cloud so that we can consume them in our Business Central applications. This is very important for those that need to leverage .NET libraries in the online Business Central environments.
In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- Consuming external web services
- Publishing your own web service
- Enabling basic authentication
- Business Central API – exploring with Postman
- Business Central API – retrieving data
- Business Central API – creating data
- Business Central API – publishing a custom endpoint
- Power Platform – using Microsoft Power BI
- Power Platform – using Microsoft Flow
- Power Platform – using Microsoft PowerApps
- Consuming Azure Functions