About This Release
Released - October 4, 2023
This version of Analytics for LS Central was released to deal with the changes in the companion table structure in Business Central and in version 23.0 from Microsoft. No functional changes are included.
Analytics will continue to be backwards compatible and support older versions of LS Central, but we needed to update our Azure data factory, and the pre-staging table scripts to support the new version.
This version of Analytics for LS Central supports versions 8.4 and later of LS Central On-premises and later versions of LS Central SaaS. Setup of Analytics for LS Central SaaS needs some additional setup from the standard Analytics onboarding process which is explained in detail in the onboarding documentation.
Updating older versions of Analytics to support
LS Central On-premises
Analytics accesses the LS Central database directly when LS Central is located on-premises, and therefore our on-premises customers using Analytics must update the populate query base pipeline at the same time as they update LS Central to version 23.0. You can do this independently of other functional updates to Analytics, so even if you are running version 2022.1 you can still apply the 2023.4 update package to your Analytics environment.
Tip: If you want to use the opportunity to get the latest functional updates, you can simply create a new Analytics environment using version 2023.4.
See update guidelines Analytics for more information.
Analytics SaaS
Analytics customers using LS Central SaaS can continue using the current and older versions of Analytics, even if LS Central SaaS is updated to version 23.0, because the Data Director uses web services to replicate the data and can differentiate between the old and the new companion table structure. Our future Analytics for LS Central SaaS updates will, however, always assume that the new companion table structure is being used, so we highly recommend updating Analytics to version 2023.3. You can do that by following the update guidelines and merge data from current tables into the new ones, or, if you have a low volume database, the simplest approach would be to create a new Analytics instance and replicate all data over to the new instance again.
If you have high-volume data (10 million transaction lines or more) and are running an older version of Analytics than 2023.3, you can still apply only the version 2023.4 update package to get the support forLS Central 23.0, but this will not apply any functional updates from the version you were running to version 2023.4. To get those, you need to update to version 2023.3 before updating to 2023.4, one version at a time. Future functional updates will, however, be available to all that have updated to version 2023.4 and the new companion table structure. To get a full functional update, you can always create a new instance of Analytics and re-replicate the data into the new instance or get assistance from LS Retail Consulting to move data between Analytics databases.
See update guidelines for more information.
Note: If you have customizations in your Analytics instance, you need to make sure before you start that the updates do not affect these customizations.
The following is a list of changes and key features in Analytics version 2023.3.
New or Enhanced Features
Setup
Product package
Prestaging table creation scripts
Thirty-three new prestaging scripts have been added for companion of tables used in Analytics. The new companion tables have the suffix $ext and include columns from LSC and LSCHT extensions provided by LS Retail. Partner extension columns need to be added especially. You can find information about how to do that in the chapter about Updating prestaging tables in the latest Analytics extension guidelines.
Old companion table scripts have been removed from the product package.
Documentation
Updates have been made to the onboarding documentation:
- Changes in SaaS Web service setup, now Publish/subscribe is done before Test Connection.
- Changes in Distribution location connection setup UI in LS Central.
Azure Data Factory
Pipelines
Changes were made to the PopulateQueryBase pipeline:
- In GETLSCentralColumnMetadata copy activity a small change was made in the source query.
Ext.Publisher AS Publisher became (COALESCE(Ext.Publisher,'Extensions') AS [Publisher]) - In PopulateQueryBase copy activity new code for creating and selecting to staging tables from new companion tables ($ext) was added to the Source Query.
Data Warehouse
Database
Tables
Record with App ID= EXT and Prefix = LSC has been added to the LSInsight$PublisherAffixReg table, so the LSC and LSCHT column prefixes are clean from the LSC and LSCHT column names that come from $ext tables, and our stored procedures continue working without modifications.
Reports
No changes were made to the report templates