Opinion on Api strategy

jordi79

We are moving from nav to bc. Our solution is heavily integrated to other solutions. One of the challenges is that all our integration is build on soap. But this will be deprecated in bc. After looking at standard ui pages, custom ui pages and odatav4, I found that these 3 technologies have limitations and issues.

Odatav4 in bc does not support deep inserts. Therefore, multiple operations have to be done using $batch calls. And there is a limit of 100 operations per batch.

As for custom ui pages, it does support deep inserts, but it has a bug where duplicate inserts can happen.

As for standard ui pages, it did not have the duplicate insert issue in custom ui pages, but standard ui pages cannot be extended.

In all these respect, cannot help but feel that soap is better.

kriki

You can also publish a codeunit as a webservice and call a function in it. This function can accept a text parameter and also a return-value. That text can contain anything you want (CSV-file(!), XML, JSON, YAML, …..) and you can handle it how you want but you do need to develop it. It is even possible to change the text parameter to an XML port.

RockWithNAV

We still have SOAP services, it's not deprecated. It's all about which route you want to go through. API pages are vey much easier to handle with JSON in picture. With the help of Bound actions you can trigger a piece of code as well like SOAP we normally use.

https://rockwithnav.wordpress.com/2025/10/14/bound-action-business-central-api/