Business Central and the Power of Power Pages

This week Microsoft has annouced the newest product in the Power Platform called “Power Pages”.
Announcing Microsoft Power Pages: Build secure, low-code websites | Microsoft Power Pages
Microsoft Power Pages | Microsoft Power Platform

“Power Pages empowers anyone, regardless of their technical background, with an effective platform to create data-powered, modern, and secure websites. In addition to being low-code, Power Pages extends far beyond portals former capabilities to enable organizations of any size to securely build websites with exciting new aesthetic features and advanced capabilities for customization with pro-developer extensibility.“

Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications & Platform, Tuesday, May 24, 2022

But what kind of cool things can you do with Business Central?

Business Central has a standard integration with Dataverse and Power Pages has also a integration with Dataverse. So in this way you can combine your BC data with Power Pages.

NB: Power Pages works only with native tables. Virtual tables aren’t supported with Power Pages!

In this way you can also simple publish websites with info or inserting records into Business Central.

For example you want to enter your customers by everyone in your company but not everyone has a Business Central License.

In Power Pages you can create a List that is based on the account table of Dataverse:

You can select the table and the view that you create in Dataverse. Then you have very easy the list in your website:

To view the records you must also added the permissions and assign it to a role.
You have three roles:

• Anonymous users: everyone
• Authenticated users: the ones that is logged into the site
• Administrators: only with administrator rights

When you do a preview you can see the result:

But if you want to add / edit / delete a a customer you can go to the properties of the list that is created:

In this case you can only insert a record and you can refer to a webpage that holds the form:

This sub page holds a form from the table Account:

If you have created a custom form the only way (that I have found) to add it go to the “Portal Management” and add the form in the section of “Basic Forms”:

If that all is done you can create a customer from your website and sync it with Business Central.

Just enter the account Name and Relationship Type and click submit:

Your entered data is inserted into the Dataverse table:

And when you do a sync with Business Central the entered data is also in there:

And the customer list:

More about Dataverse and Business Central:
Dataverse – Discover Microsoft Business Central (bertverbeek.nl)