One of the many reasons to use Popdock’s Query Builder for Business Central is the ability to create efficient reports that join multiple tables together. You can join your tables, including all your third-party extensions, into nice single tables that you can use for reporting. We do this by creating extensions for queries on the underlying table data. This is great because you can combine anything, and it’s the fastest way to get real-time data.
However, you may not know exactly what tables your data resides in.
To figure out the underlying table and extension for something you can see on a page, you can utilize D365 Business Central’s “inspect pages and data” feature.
Start by opening your Business Central instance, and click the question mark in the header.
Under troubleshooting, choose “Inspect pages and data.”
This will bring up the inspection pane. Initially, it will show the data from your main section. You can click on other page sections or fact boxes on the page to view data about their fields. In the header of the page inspection sidebar, you will see the source table (if it exists). In the table fields section, you’ll see the fields referenced from the table on the page section. Each field will display its name, value on the page, the extension it originates from, and some other additional information. The name of the table field may not be the same as the name on the page, although it usually is. You can use the combination of the value displayed and the fact the names should be something similar to figure out any differences.
Additionally, when publishing a Query Builder list using third-party extensions or any extensions outside of the base application, you need to manually manage the extension that your reports depend on. If you want to use tables or fields outside the base application, you will need to add the source extensions to your Business Central connector. To add extensions to your connector, sign in to Popdock and edit your Business Central connector. Then, in the extension section, you can add any required extensions.
If you don’t add the extension when you are publishing a new extension for the Business Central sandbox, you will receive an error message like: “Table ‘XXX’ is missing. The source of a Column or Filter must be defined on the table referenced by its parent DataItem. A column must have a valid data source or have the ‘Method’ property set to ‘Count’.”
Here, the ‘XXX’ placeholder signifies the name of a specific table you’re attempting to utilize and you’re making references to columns from a table that isn’t included in the standard application. This is because you haven’t designated the extension as a dependency. So, find the required extensions for the tables you are using, and add them to your connector.
We hope this helps in trying to locate your Business Central tables. If you have any other questions, contact one of our Popdock experts at sales@eonesolutions.com or 888-319-3663 ext. 1.
