SourceForge Software Services has shipped the SourceForge Insight — Role Center Dashboard add-on for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It joins the AI Assistant, OCR Payable Agent, Reconciliation Agent, Global Payroll & HR, Plant & Maintenance, AI Mobile WMS and Retail for BC extensions, bringing the count to eight production BC extensions.
Insight is a configurable charting dashboard that sits at the top of every supported Role Center, above the standard Cues — which the product never modifies. The placement is implemented with additive Page Extensions using addfirst; disabling Insight for any user or company returns the Role Center to its original layout with zero residue.
The data model has two paths. A curated catalog ships with 92 sources covering sales / AP / AR / inventory trends and breakdowns, top customers / items / locations, KPIs over stable base tables, and region-specific tax and compliance dashboards. Each source is registered in the SFDB catalog with table, measure, dimension, date field and curated filter; resolved at runtime through the same RecordRef aggregator the generic builder uses. Beyond the curated set, a generic Widget Builder lets power users pull any permitted table into a dashboard — picking measure, dimension, aggregation, chart type, date bucket and filters.
Governance is in three layers. BC's standard read-permission system: the generic provider uses RecordRef / FieldRef, so a user who can't read the table in BC can't put it on a dashboard. An administrator allowlist: only tables the admin has explicitly enabled appear in the Widget Builder. Sensitive-field exclusions: a global blocklist of field IDs hides sensitive columns (e.g., salaries on the Employee table) even where the user has table read permission. All failures fail safely with a permission-denied tile rather than leaking data or breaking the Role Center.
Rendering uses two MIT-licensed chart libraries — ApexCharts and Chart.js — both embedded as control-addin resources. Providers emit only data points and light metadata; the serializer is the single writer of the normalised series JSON; a JavaScript dispatcher in the SFDB ChartHost add-in maps the JSON to whichever library the widget specifies. Switching a widget from one renderer to the other is a metadata change with no re-compute. No CDN is used at runtime; no data leaves the tenant. The product is designed for air-gapped operation and data-residency-sensitive deployments.
Performance and resilience: every widget computes in a Page Background Task — a read-only child session — so the Role Center stays interactive during refresh. A failing widget is isolated and never breaks the Role Center. Cache hits skip the background task entirely. Results live in the SFDB Series Cache table with per-widget TTL; users see something useful within a few hundred milliseconds even on cold loads of complex widgets.
Six region packs activate at install: India (GST KPIs and statutory dashboards), United Arab Emirates (VAT and ZATCA awareness), Saudi Arabia (VAT and ZATCA Phase 2 KPIs), European Union (per-country VAT and EC Sales List), United States (state + local tax and 1099 awareness), Australia (BAS and GST). Each pack registers its sources into the same SFDB catalog with no engine changes. Arabic drives full right-to-left layout end to end; number, date and currency formatting follow locale via Intl.
Architecture is AppSourceCop compliant with the SFDB affix on every object. Object range 54400-54599 (core) plus 54600-54739 (region packs). Three role-based permission sets — SFDB Read, SFDB User, SFDB Admin. AL runtime 16.0, Cloud target. Distributed as a Per-Tenant Extension; AppSource publication is on the roadmap.
Implementation is fast. The Assisted Setup auto-enables the right region pack for the company country on install and seeds the catalog with sane defaults — most customers see the curated dashboards on day one. Tuning the surfaced widgets per Role Center (picking which 6-8 widgets each role lands on) is typically a one-week consulting engagement. Building bespoke dashboards via the generic builder is workshop-style, 1-2 weeks per business area.
Full product page at /products/sourceforge-insight