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It is incredibly difficult to find documentation on tables, lists, queries, and fields. Particularly for the non-developers who want to build Power BI (or similar) reports. CTRL-ALT-F1 is incredibly helpful, but not inclusive. It would also be helpful to know if a field is a “system” field and therefore not available on reports. 


Some of the lists are so similarly named, that it can be difficult to understand which to use. I’ve noticed that with fields too. Many fields are named the same but contain different data in related tables.

Category: Documentation
STATUS DETAILS
Needs Votes
Ideas Administrator

Thank you for logging this idea. It is a known gap and an area we would like to improve, and in fact, there is currently work going on prototyping a much improved documentation of the application. This will not be available for the 2022 release wave 1 at launch, but hopefully either in a minor or for 2022 release wave 2 launch. 

In the meantime, please continue voting for this.


Regards,
Business Central R&D team

Comments

B

Might I add this is super necessary even for *developers*.The Business Central database is complicated and difficult to trawl through.It doesn't help that every table for every ERP company is in one single database so many tools time out during catalogue discovery. e.g. have 18 companies in your ERP (including CRONUS and test and ZZZ and all the things accountants love to make) with 3.6K tables each and suddenly you have over 66K tables.Then the same table appears multiple times, because it occurs again for each extension, for each company.Finding some things is very difficult; the CTRL+ALT+F1 is nifty but doesn't seem to give info on, say, a list that is drawn from multiple tables. And in this case, the developer doesn't really know the application - much like app users who aren't developers need data dictionary documentation, so too do the developers who aren't application users!Microsoft, it's nearly the end of 2023 so I hope this will be coming. Thank you.

Category: Documentation

B

I agree with this. I am not new to Business Central - we have been using it since 2019. But it would be great to understand the differences between the "excel" versions of tables and the non-excel versions of tables. This area is a black hole of information. Changes are made with BC updates and not documented anywhere.

Category: Documentation

B

We are new to Business Central and I find not having this information is causing significant challenges for a number of reasons. First, I agree that non-developers need this information for creating reports utilizing something like Jet and Power BI. However, as the admin within our company, I have users that are still struggling with permission issues. The effective permissions error message is not descriptive enough to tell me the exact table name and number (super important) for me to then turn around and provide that user with the permissions they need.

Category: Documentation