Designing Modern Integrations in Business Central

Overview

The session argues that Business Central is an ERP system and not an integration service, and presents patterns that make integrations easier to test, trace and recover. The core is a single integration message table with a type field and a message handler interface. Error handling, scheduling and retries are implemented once and reused across integrations. Supporting patterns include idempotency keys, runtime error classification, delayed replies, correlation IDs, and small atomic steps run through job queues, inspired by Azure durable functions.

The speakers also cover inbound and outbound data flow. Inbound webhooks need a separate integration service. Polling should use incremental reads and a stage-and-exit approach. Outbound business events, which are in preview, can notify external systems, with payload requests directed to a read replica. In a demo, an agent trained on the BC quality knowledge base and a community integration repo produced a technical design and an extension from a written brief. Q&A covers API throttling, JSON parsing, 3PL warehouse integration, network timeouts, message prioritization and retention.

Key points

• Store integration requests in a message table with a type field and a message handler interface, instead of making direct HTTP calls during posting. Error handling, scheduling and retries are then built once.
• Duplicate handling and idempotency keys are described as needed from day one. The speakers say Business Central has no platform mechanism today to prevent double posting.
• Classify errors at runtime and route them to the right owner, rather than only logging them. A dispatcher service compares failed messages against an error table.
• Business Central cannot listen to external endpoints. Inbound webhooks need a separate integration service that converts them to integration messages.
• Poll with a setup table that stores the last pull time, and keep the polling job limited to fetching into a staging table.
• Business events are in preview. Delivery can be delayed by more than 5 minutes, which the speakers say makes them unsuitable for real-time inventory sync. Full payload requests should go to a read replica.
• The speakers say the Business Central cloud has a hard-coded network timeout of 1 minute. In Q&A they said their message retention keeps completed messages for one week and failed messages for one month.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• other “BC quality” at 5:02
• table “integration message table” at 17:48
• table “integration error table” at 22:29
• interface “message handler interface” at 1:02:30
• enum “directions for enum” at 1:04:18
• table “interesting message” at 1:04:18
• other “integration message” at 1:13:38
• other “data exchange definition” at 1:12:16
• other “warehouse shipment” at 1:17:30
• other “warehouse receipt” at 1:17:30
• other “message table” at 1:24:58
• other “job queue categories” at 1:23:23

Not found in BC28-30: table “integration message table”, table “integration error table”, interface “message handler interface”, enum “directions for enum”, table “interesting message”.

Quotes

• 3:30 “They wanted to have some kind of website or some kind of storefront thing that uh when their customers placing orders, you want to”
• 4:48 “the Microsoft came up with this great concept of BC quality. I think many of you have heard about this and may many of”
• 5:29 “when we run our agents in the uh environment, the agents already knows that what are the good practices about Business Central uh integrations,”
• 12:29 “What this is about is basically like a table which contains uh where where basically anything that you want to stream as an inbound”
• 12:41 “It’s not for reading. If you wanted to read data or external system wants to read the data, they probably can go into queries”

Disclaimers in the video

• 6:56 other: we plan to create a pull request to Microsoft, so this will be part in its original repo for the Microsoft
• 38:02 preview: Business Events still in preview after a couple of years
• 42:52 preview: I think we know the reason why it’s still in preview. It’s not instantaneously. There can be cases, which is …
• 44:22 other: we hoping and we pushing Microsoft to hopefully they will fix it because from our perspective, nothing like this is acceptable.
• 1:03:16 other: Your knowledge base or the repo on the BC quality one is like a living document
• 1:04:30 other: I can’t like confirm it correctly without running it
• 1:08:09 coming-later: within like few weeks time the let me the knowledge that we created will be on the BC quality one
• 1:09:04 not-in-this-release: No, it’s That’s actually been stopped, the FTP client. So, there won’t be a typical client in Business Central.
• 1:23:59 other: all of this code would be open source

Presenters (as heard): Tharanga Chandrasekar, Vlad, Trong, Trung, Jeremy.