From the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central/NAV Blogs: OData; Inventory costing; AL language

This week, on the Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV blog roundup:

• Reporting from NAV: the benefits of OData
• CRS AL language extension - running objects
• Inventory costing with Dynamics NAV - a brief overview

Reporting from NAV: the benefits of OData

On the Fenwick Software blog, Jake Edwards stated that he is often asked what options are available when reporting from Dynamics NAV. Although NAV's internal tools, such as Analysis Reports, are powerful, some users opt for tools such as Excel and Power BI.

Edwards stated that the Dynamics NAV, and D365 Business Central architecture has evolved to allow more compatible methods for reporting, using technologies such as Open Data Protocol (OData).

According to Edwards, OData is becoming the primary method for externally accessing data from Dynamics NAV. It has several benefits compared to SQL, including that it works natively with Excel, and Power BI.

You can read more about the benefits of OData here.

CRS AL language extension - running objects

On Waldo's Blog, Eric Wauters revisited a previous post, in which he said that he was going to give a more detailed description of the functionality of the tool that he is working on to make users' "AL-life" in VSCODE easier: the "CRS AL Language Extension."

In this post, Waldo described the "running objects" functionality, the first major feature that he tried to add - the ability to run an object without having to change, and save the launch.json.