Currently, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central only supports communication with external systems via HTTPS-based REST APIs. While this model is reliable and broadly adopted, it can become a bottleneck in scenarios requiring high-frequency, low-latency communication.

One area where this limitation becomes apparent is in performance-critical operations, such as dynamic pricing logic, which may be invoked repeatedly during processes like order entry, quote generation, or webshop interactions.

Why gRPC?

gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call) is a modern, high-performance communication protocol that uses HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) for efficient, strongly typed message exchange. Compared to REST, gRPC offers:

• Lower payload size due to binary serialization (Protobuf)
• Multiplexing and streaming capabilities via HTTP/2
• Significantly reduced latency
• Strongly typed contracts with auto-generated client/server code
• Bi-directional and asynchronous communication support

These features make gRPC especially attractive for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and microservice architectures.

Use Case: Centralized Pricing Service

A key example would be offloading the price calculation logic into a dedicated external service. This pricing service could then be:

• Consumed not only by Business Central but also by other applications (e.g. e-commerce platforms)
• Independently deployed, updated, and scaled
• Shared across multiple Business Central tenants or systems

This decouples the ERP logic from performance-heavy operations, increases maintainability, and aligns with modern system integration practices.

Proposed Feature

Enable Business Central to natively consume gRPC services, without relying on intermediate REST wrappers. This could include:

• Built-in AL language support for gRPC service definitions (e.g., via .proto contracts)
• A client-side gRPC connector in AL or via a service proxy
• Support for HTTP/2 and Protobuf encoding in outbound calls

Alternatively, exposing Business Central services as gRPC endpoints would also unlock new integration models and performance gains for partners and customers.