If you’re one of the many SmartConnect customers running integrations with Dynamics 365 Business Central, there’s a lot to be excited about in New SmartConnect. As one of SmartConnect’s most heavily used connectors, we’re very excited to share the upgrades that are included in the new version of SmartConnect
In this week’s edition of New SmartConnect Office Hours, we covered some of the updates that are live in the new SmartConnect user interface, and others are on the way. For a full rundown of what’s changing, what’s staying the same, and what it means for the integrations you’re building, watch the recording below:
The Revamped D365 Business Central Connector
The existing Business Central connector isn’t going through major changes, so you don’t have to worry about these updates disrupting your current integrations. It still supports OData, along with both the standard Business Central V2 and custom APIs, whether those come from other ISVs or from Business Central itself.
One thing to note: there’s currently no NAV SOAP connector, and whether our team builds one for SmartConnect depends on feedback from our customers to determine how necessary it is. The good news is, as long as you’re running a new enough version of NAV or Business Central to have the OData APIs, then you don’t need the SOAP connectivity at all; you’ll just have some additional mapping to move to the OData connection. This fits into eOne’s move to reduce our reliance on SOAP connections across the board.
New First-Party eOne Integration APIs
In the next month or so, SmartConnect will be releasing first-party eOne integration APIs to Business Central via AppSource. This means anyone with a SmartConnect license will automatically have access to an expanded list of APIs.
Right now, there are around 100 endpoints, with more being added, and most of them are webhook-supported wherever possible. We know standard V2 APIs don’t provide enough depth for most customers, so we’re expanding on them to include what you need. Here’s what that looks like:
- Integration IDs on over 50 tables: Covering all your master data and transaction tables, these IDs let Business Central store external IDs directly, which accelerates mapping against more rigid APIs.
- Automated resolver lookups: If you’re integrating Salesforce and Business Central, for example, you can pass a Salesforce ID directly onto a sales order. If the account and customer are already linked, SmartConnect automatically finds and links the correct customer (no manual lookup required). That means better performance and simpler integrations for predictable lookup scenarios.
- Simplified complex objects: Journals and similar objects are being standardized around business objects rather than Business Central’s native journal structure, which is more intuitive for non-ERP people building integrations.
- Flattened mapping for tricky objects: Attachments, notes, comments, dimensions, and contacts are all objects that Business Central stores in ways that aren’t necessarily easy to understand. These are being flattened into an easy-to-map interface, so builders don’t need to understand the complex business logic of Business Central to work with them.
A Look at the New SmartConnect UI
Setting up a Business Central connector still feels familiar within the new SmartConnect user interface. The navigation is unchanged, and each connector still connects to one environment while pulling in all of your companies.
What’s new is that the list of API routes will include first-party APIs as they roll out, so it’s easy to see and add new endpoints as they become available. We’ve also added webhook support for third-party APIs. This is a key piece of a broader shift toward event-driven integrations, relying less on scheduled runs and more on real-time, webhook-driven architecture.
Better Visibility into What’s Connected
One of the more practical improvements addresses the common problem of not knowing what’s actually using a given connector. Now, SmartConnect surfaces the data sources and integrations already linked to a particular connector, and you can jump directly to any related object from there. Surface exactly what is linked to a particular connector, including drafts, data sources, and integrations.
There’s also a new fields section that lets you configure exactly which fields move between the raw API and other systems. This allows you to optimize your integrations, particularly with more SQL or CRM-based applications that have hundreds of fields on a table.
A Safer Way to Edit
Another change driven by user feedback is a new process view that’s read-only, so you can review an integration without any risk of accidentally changing it.
When you’re ready to make edits, clicking “edit” opens an existing draft (or creates a new one), letting you work without touching the live, running integration. Before this, there was no way to see who changed what, and no way to catch an accidental edit. Now, moving changes from draft into the live integration is a deliberate, conscious step instead of something that happens by accident.
Deeper Mapping
When building an integration into Business Central, the core structure is familiar, but what’s new is the ability to bind fields to a parent record and run actions on a given service.
During the New SmartConnect Office Hours demo, ship-to addresses were set up as a child of the customer service. A parent field captures the customer’s ID or number, so instead of relying on a source column, the ship-to service pulls that value directly from its parent. Once a parent record (like a customer) is created, Business Central returns its ID. SmartConnect catches that ID and maps it into the next service, enabling multi-level linking between related records.
With the standard APIs, that’s about as deep as you can go, but with the upcoming first-party APIs, New SmartConnect will support going two or three layers deep.
Automating Actions
Services can now have actions to them. In the demo, a sales order service was set up so that, once it’s successfully imported, it automatically triggers a ship-and-invoice action.
Actions can also be added as a standalone final step. In the walkthrough, we did all of the following within the same integration:
- Create the customer
- Add ship-to addresses
- Create the order lines
- Release the sales order
Rollback on Failure
Because deep inserts aren’t always possible, like when you’re updating or patching an order that already exists, the standard rollback behavior doesn’t always apply.
With the new rollback-on-failure functionality, if any step in the process fails, all the associated steps roll back. That includes customer, address, order, order lines, and release. Even if it’s only the final release step that fails, everything rolls back together.
Additional Columns
Business Central’s existing lookup types (API lookup and OData lookup) are both still supported and work pretty much the same as before. The enhancement is that lookups can now return multiple fields in a single call, rather than being limited to just one.
New Cache Level for Lookups
Today, lookups are always “data row cached”, meaning if you’re processing 10 orders for the same customer, SmartConnect looks up that customer 10 separate times. The same goes for something like a salesperson lookup by email addresses. If 10 orders share the same salesperson, that’s 10 different lookups.
The new cache-level setting lets an integration remember a lookup result for the duration of a run. If you know a value like the salesperson isn’t going to change mid-run, the integration only needs to perform that lookup once. This eliminates 9 unnecessary API calls. Depending on the size and scope of your integration, this can dramatically reduce both run time and API call volume.
This feature isn’t specific to the revamped Business Central connector and will be available across all connectors in New SmartConnect.
Real-Time Monitoring & Performance at Scale
Real-time integration views and error handling notifications give you a continuous feed of any records that fail during a run. What’s changed is that these records are now stored as “compressed objects”, benefiting environments that run thousands of map runs a day.
Previously, an integration that got stuck and generated a lot of errors could cause log tables to slow down, causing some screens to lag or time out. Now that everything is stored as a single, streamlined database record, that slowdown should be dramatically reduced, if not eliminated altogether.
What’s Next & Upcoming Sessions
These upgrades to the new SmartConnect Business Central connector point to a bigger shift with SmartConnect itself. We are headed in a new direction, focusing on event-driven architecture, deeper and more flexible mapping, and meaningful performance improvements that apply across all connectors.
More details on other updated connectors and New SmartConnect features will be shared regularly as we get closer to release. If you haven’t signed up for New SmartConnect Office Hours and want to learn more about these new features, it’s not too late.
Upcoming Office Hour topics include:
- September 3: Using New SmartConnect with Dataverse
- September 10: Using New SmartConnect with Generic REST APIs
- September 17: Using New SmartConnect with Salesforce
- October 1: Using New SmartConnect with NetSuite
- November 5: Using New SmartConnect with Dynamics GP
- November 12: Using New SmartConnect with Shopify
- November 19: Using New SmartConnect with Dynamics NAV
