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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.

What you're building​

A Pageworks layout is not a Word document and not an RDLC report — it's a .pageworks file, a small, well-formed XHTML-like text format specific to this engine. You author it as plain text (tables, headers/footers, bindings to report columns, conditionals), then publish it against a BC report and it becomes a real, selectable layout for that report in the BC client — no compile step, no extension required for the layout itself. See Template language for the full element/attribute vocabulary, and External API for publishLayout and the rest of the render/discover/manage surface if you're building or driving this from outside the BC client.

Feature landscape​

  • Template language — tables, headers/footers, <region> (coordinate-positioned), bindings ({{Column}}), conditionals (data-if), repeats (data-each). The core authoring surface; start with Template language reference.
  • Fonts — a baseline set ships automatically; upload custom/corporate fonts via the pageworksFonts asset entity. See Fonts and Font support & limitations.
  • Barcodes (1D) — Code 39, Code 128, EAN-13 via font-coupled encoders — no external barcode image generation needed. See Barcodes.
  • QR codes — <qr/> draws a native vector matrix, no font or image asset required. See QR codes.
  • Images — register logos/images once via the pageworksImages asset entity, then reference them by name from <img>.
  • Shared styles — define a named style once (e.g. corporate colors, a heading treatment) and reuse it across templates instead of repeating inline style="...". See Styles.
  • Dataset fields (custom fields, no AL) — pull additional fields from related tables into a report's dataset by configuration; a template referencing the new column renders the real, per-row pulled value. See Dataset fields for how to configure a binding.
  • Diagnostics & geometry — verify a render's layout programmatically (page overflow, row overflow, computed box geometry for every element) without rasterizing the PDF to an image. See renderTemplateWithDiagnostics in External API.
  • Report & field discovery — enumerate which reports are eligible layout targets, and which dataset columns each one exposes, entirely over the external API — no AL source reading required. See External API.

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.

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.