Natively Connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Dynamics 365 Business Central into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Dynamics 365 Business Central-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

To authenticate to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must select an AuthScheme and provide the required properties (OAuth by default).

All Methods

Specify the . If you have multiple companies in your organization, you must also specify the to indicate which company you would like to connect to. does not need to be specified if you have only one company.

Access Key

To authenticate with an Access Key, set AuthScheme to "AccessKey" and provide the and properties.

To obtain the and values, navigate to the Users page in Dynamics 365 Business Central and then click on Edit. The User Name and Web Service Access Key values are what you will enter as the and connection string properties. Note that the User Name is not your email address. It is a shortened user name.

If you wish to authenticate through other methods, refer to the Help documentation.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Dynamics 365 Business Central by calling the or methods. To close connections, use or .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC D365BusinessCentral Source","user","password");

Connections opened with are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC D365BusinessCentral Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Accounts WHERE Name = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC D365BusinessCentral Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Accounts WHERE Name = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('MyAccount'));
 

Execute nonparameterized queries with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC D365BusinessCentral Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT accountid, Name FROM Accounts");
 

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Dynamics 365 Business Central data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT accountid, Name FROM Accounts");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["accountid"] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Dynamics 365 Business Central data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Accounts WHERE Name = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('MyAccount'));
if($success)
 odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are Dynamics 365 Business Central-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.