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Pageworks

Pageworks is an in-tenant, deterministic PDF report-rendering engine for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It replaces the platform's Word/RDLC layout pipeline for the reports you wire to it, rendering PDF output natively inside your BC environment — no external service, no document content ever leaving the tenant.

  • In-tenant — rendering happens inside Business Central. No external calls, no data export.
  • Deterministic — the same report and data always produce byte-identical PDF output.
  • Text-first — layouts are plain, well-formed .pageworks files: diff-friendly, reviewable in a pull request, and easy for a person or an AI agent to author directly.
  • Closed-source engine, open contract — the engine itself ships closed-source, but its public API (partial/font/image registration, template validation, and the layout wiring contract) is small, stable, and fully documented here. This site — the public contract, the template language, and the developer/consultant guides — is the complete external surface of Pageworks; nothing about how the engine works internally is needed to use or extend it.

Where to start​

  • Business analyst / consultant designing a layout? Start with Getting started — wiring a report and writing your first .pageworks template.
  • AL developer building a dependency app? Start with the Developer reference — the complete public API contract.
  • Planning an upgrade or dependency version? See API stability and Versioning policy.

Getting Pageworks​

Pageworks is distributed on Microsoft AppSource. Found a bug, or want to request a feature? Open an issue in this repo. See what's planned next on the roadmap.

:::tip Sandbox environments carry a watermark Every page rendered while the license/installation is running in a Business Central sandbox environment carries a diagonal, tiled "SANDBOX" watermark — this is by design and cannot be suppressed by any template or layout setting. Production environments render without it. Use a sandbox for evaluation and testing; the watermark disappears automatically once the same layout runs in production. :::