Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 and OData, close but no cigar
Prior to the release of GP2016, I was super excited about the new OData feature. I was so looking forward to a live method of sharing data in SQL Server (from Microsoft Dynamics GP) to Microsoft Power BI and Excel, regardless of whether the data is on Premise or in the Cloud. Big sentence, big request. So what is OData anyways? OData is a set of rules and procedures that allow users to access data via an API, even allowing users to create API’s. OData stands for Open Data Protocol. OData will provide you a consistent experience accessing data from anywhere on any device. So what is an API then? API’s are a set of programming instructions that allow one piece of software to access data from another piece of software. API stands for Application Programming Interface. A good example of this is when a game you play on your iPad prompts you to use Facebook credentials for the game log in. The game is using an API to get your log in information from Facebook instead of creating a log in system of their own. The API will create a secure URL called an “Endpoint” to expose only the data you want exposed, and nothing else. Putting it together Obviously it is much more technical than I spell it out here, but if you were not sure what it all does, this will give you a bit of a foundation. To put the pieces together for our world, let’s [...]