How “Business Central OData V4 Unbound Actions” and “Xamarin” are a perfect match.

THE MOBILE PERSPECTIVE IN QUERY ODATA AND API

I initially found it difficult to implement complex interfaces between Business Central and Xamarin mobile apps by using ODATAv4 and API Pages.

Luckily Busines Central offers plenty of solutions to implement interfaces and both OData Bound and Unbound Actions are really awesome features.

One of common scenario I have to deal with is a mobile app showing sales prices, discounts and availability for a specific item for a customer.

In this situation, I prefer to leave to Business Central the logic to determine the right price and discount for the item because often this evaluation involves a custom logic implemented on BC side and the final price is not obtained as it would be with the standard.

Moreover with BC v16 a new logic and interface for price evaluation has been introduced and the “Sales Price” is now obsolete:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-extending-best-price-calculations

New pricing functionality in BC version 16

STEP 1: THE BUSINESS CENTRAL DATA UNBOUND ACTION

This is the sample codeunit with two different type of parameters.

In the first procedure I pass a generic JSON and then I deserialise it.

In the second procedure I pass direct parameters.

STEP 2: MAP THE CODEUNIT IN WEB SERVICES

The configuration may be managed via WSPublishing.xml.

STEP 3: TEST THE API WITH INSOMNIA

The POST for the two procedures:

The company is passed as an header parameters. May be passed in the URL too but I on my opinion the header solution is easier for Xamarin Forms implementation.

STEP 4: THE XAMARIN HTTP REQUEST

The Json input class: