Open Dynamics NAV page directly from Power BI

In April 2014 we blogged about a new feature of our Excel-addin NAVBI that allows opening NAV pages from any Pivot table. Due to a limitation of pivot tables, the link had to be added to the drill-through (details) sheet. We are very pleased that the new Power BI release from last week now provides an easy way to create a link to NAV directly in any Power BI report.

What is necessary? Similarly to our solution last year we will use NAV to create the link to each record. We will use the customer list as an example. We need to add a new column to our customer list page that is sourced from the GETURL-function:

We are going to create a Web Client-URL (CLIENTTYPE::Web) since Power BI currently only supports http and https://-urls. Run-Hyperlinks that would be necessary for the Windows clients are currently not supported.

We are importing the OData-feed from this page into Power BI and setting the data category to Web URL:

After adding the URL to any customer related report, we can click on it…

…in order to jump into the record in NAV:

Simple, yet effective.

It would be even better if we could add a link to a table field without exposing the entire URL to the user (like a short text) - this is one of the ideas that we would like to see in one of the upcoming Power BI updates.