Quick Tip: BC28: What Is New in Document Reporting

At the start of April I published a hands-on post about the Word add-in and mentioned that a new version was in preview with improvements coming in a minor BC28 update.

BC28 is now generally available, and the BCLE session “What’s new: Enhanced Document Reporting” presented by Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan and Mirko from the engineering team covers the full scope of what changed this wave. There is more to it than just the add-in.

• Watch the session here: Enhanced Document Reporting (YouTube)

Updated Word Add-in

The redesigned data picker is the headline change. The following improvements are available in both the preview and release versions of the add-in:

• The tree is easier to navigate with clearer visual nesting levels.
  
• Fields can be inserted by double-clicking rather than selecting and clicking a separate button.
• When inserting a field inside a table, the cursor automatically advances to the next cell, making multi-column layouts faster to build.
  
• A search bar filters across all data items, labels, and report information at once, so finding a specific field in a large dataset no longer means scrolling through the entire tree.
  
• A new metadata action opens a popup summarizing the key properties of a selected data item, useful when working with a dataset you did not build yourself.
  
• Dark mode is now supported.
  

Table Builder (Preview)

The table builder is shipping as a preview feature. It adds an Insert Table action to the data control section of the add-in. When you click it, a dialog lets you configure the table in one place:

1. Select a data source from the report dataset, for example Sales Line.
2. Define the number of columns and whether to include a header row.
3. Pick which fields go in each column. An auto-select headline toggle fills in the column caption automatically.
4. Optionally add a footer row outside the repeater for summary fields such as a total amount.
5. Click Create Table and the full structure lands in the document: header, repeater, data columns, and footer, all correctly mapped.

For anyone who has built Word layouts with line sections manually, the current workflow requires placing a table in Word, adding a WordMergeDataItem comment to mark the repeater row, then inserting each field column by column through the task pane.

The table builder compresses all of that into a single dialog.

Layout Lifecycle Status

User-defined layouts on the Report Layouts page can now be assigned a lifecycle status. The available states are:

• Draft: the layout is being worked on and not yet ready for use.
• Pending Approval: the layout is submitted for review but not yet approved.
• Approved: the layout is production-ready and visible to users on the report request page.
• Retired: the layout is no longer in use and hidden from users.

 

Only Approved layouts are visible to users on the report request page. All other states are hidden from consumers and only accessible to layout administrators. This gives administrators a formal mechanism to control what appears on request pages without having to delete layouts that may still be needed for reference.

One important limitation: this applies only to user-defined layouts, not to layouts deployed by apps or extensions. Extension layout lifecycle management is on the roadmap but not in this release wave.

Company-Level Default Document Language

Business Central uses the language code on the customer card to determine the language of outgoing documents. If no language code is set, it falls back to the UI language of the user generating the document.

In a multilingual team that means the same customer can receive invoices in different languages depending on who triggered the send. It is a common problem in Belgian, Swiss, and other multilingual company setups.

BC28 adds a Default Language Code field on the Company Information page. The resolution order is now:

1. customer card language code first
2. company default second
3. user UI language last

Tooltips on Reports

Microsoft has been refactoring tooltip definitions from page level down to table level across the application, and as part of that work, those tooltips now surface in the Word add-in data picker.

The session frames this as the first of several such refactoring passes that will happen over the next year. Worth knowing if you are building or maintaining Word layouts and want to understand why some fields now have descriptive tooltips in the picker where they previously had none.

Modernized Report Selection Pages

The report selection pages across Sales, Purchasing, and other areas are being modernized with consistent category naming, aligned captions, and teaching tips.

This is coming in a 28.x minor update rather than at GA launch. The teaching tips also surface in the report explorer and are used by Copilot chat and advanced Tell Me, so the alignment work has reach beyond just the selection pages themselves.

36 New Document APIs

This is the change with the broadest technical impact. BC28 ships 36 new API endpoints covering document types across sales, purchasing, inventory, and assembly.

Previously, Business Central exposed APIs for a handful of document types: sales invoices, sales quotes, and a few others. The new endpoints fill in the gaps comprehensively.

• Sales: blanket sales orders and archived blanket sales orders, covering the full sales document range.
• Purchasing: purchase quotes through to archived blanket purchase orders.
• Inventory: inventory orders through to posted direct transfers.
• Assembly: assembly orders and posted assembly orders.

The practical consequence is that integrations built on Power Automate, Copilot Studio, Logic Apps, or any HTTP-based automation can now interact with a much wider range of document types without requiring custom AL code.

For partners who have been building workarounds to generate or retrieve documents that lacked API coverage, this removes significant complexity. The Microsoft Learn documentation for these APIs is accessible via aka.ms/bcIntegration.