Business Central Default APIs are not localized – or are they?

Good news.

You’re probably all familiar with the great work Microsoft is doing on providing us a huge set of useful out-of-the-box API’s. No? Well, you can find all the information right here: API(V2.0) for Dynamics 365 Business Central – Business Central | Microsoft Docs

For Belgium, these have been useless in many situations though. Simply said: the Belgian localization has some fields that kind of replace default fields (VAT Registration Code). When I contacted Microsoft about it, the statement was simple:

The Business Central Default APIs are not localized

Microsoft

And I can understand, most honestly. So I didn’t expect anything to change, and started to abandon the default APIs completely and implement custom APIs in all situations.
In fact – since the default Business Central APIs are “never” localized, and chances are that you ARE in a localized database – that means there is always a chance there is something wrong/missing from the default APIs. So “just” using them and assuming everything will just work out-of-the-box is may be not the best assumption to make.. .

Recently, my eye caught this change in 18.1:

So – it seems that for the Belgian localization, Microsoft made a workaround to foresee this “Enterprise No.” fields in stead of the “VAT Registration No.” – which kind of like would mean that the default Business Central APIs just got a whole lot more interesting for Belgium.

And may be not only for the Belgian localization. I don’t know. I notice quite a lot of changes on the V2 APIs since the 18.0 release:

It makes sense to browse through the code changes between different versions of Business Central. This is basically how I figured out the above. If you’d like to know how? Well, here’s a video where I show that using Stefan Maron‘s tool ;-).

Does this mean – let’s all use the default APIs?

Well, for me not just yet, but at least for Belgium it’s worth considering again – at least in some cases. I know about some use cases where it’s absolutely necessary to be able to connect to BC without any kind of custom API. All I can say is: make sure the data is like it’s supposed to be, test it thoroughly in the situation of that specific customer, .. basically meaning: you should be making a conscious choice in stead of just assuming all is well ;-). That’s all.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.waldo.be/2021/07/02/business-central-default-apis-are-not-localized-or-are-they/

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