As someone who began their career learning about the Power Platform and using it to extend Microsoft Business Central, I am no stranger to OData woes. Whether it is connection errors or poor load performance due to large amounts of data. In this blog post I wanted to touch on common connection error I saw early on when using the Business Central Connector (SaaS). In this example I will use Power BI.

BC SaaS “Read-Only Error”

Since February 2022, new Power BI reports that use Business Central data will connect to a read-only replica of the Business Central database by default. In rare cases (in my case as a consultant early on – many cases), depending on the page design, you’ll get an error when you try to connect to and get data from the page. As a consultant, early on this was frustrating. However, the good news is, it is easily fixable.

DataSource.Error: Dynamics365BusinessCentral: Request failed: The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request. (Cannot modify a record. Current connection intent is Read-Only.

 CorrelationId: c8c7d4e-b4f5-42cc-8ef8-0553c0e7774

1. In Power Query Editor, select Advanced Editor from the ribbon.
2. In the line that starts with Source =, replace the following text:
   1. Dynamics365BusinessCentral.ApiContentsWithOptions(null, null, null, null)

        With:

1. Dynamics365BusinessCentral.ApiContentsWithOptions(null, null, null, [UseReadOnlyReplica = false])
   
   And that’s it! Once you close the Advanced Editor, you should then be able to preview and carry out your ETL Transformations.
   
   Need help connecting Power BI to Business Central? Check out my other blog post on the topic!
   
   In my next blog post, I will be covering popular OData Conversions that can be used to filter data coming from Business Central to help poor performance and load times.