BCCL

Business Central Command Line

Create Stub Records

Sometimes when importing data into Business Central, you need to make sure that related tables have the correct corresponding records. BCCL can create a stub record in related tables.

A stub record is an almost empty record with only the primary key filled out.

In the following example, we’ll create Customer Posting Groups while importing customers.

Here’s a CSV file with three customers, the forth column is the Customer Posting Group:

Number,Name,ZIP,PostGroup
"4000","The First Customer","92020","GRP1"
"4050","The Seconds Customer","92030","GRP1"
"5040","And another Customer","92080","GRP2"

In the BCCL mapping file, we can set CreateRelatedSub to true to have BCCL create

    {
      "FieldNo": 21,
      "FieldName": "Post Code",
      "MappedName": "PostGroup",
      "Validate": "true",
      "CreateRelatedStub": true
    }

Calling BCCL will insert three customers and create two stub records in the customer posting group table.

❯bccl -t putdata -s table=18 -i customers.csv -m mapping.json
{
  "Table": 18,
  "Inserted": 3,
  "Modified": 0,
  "StubRecords": [
    {
      "Table": 92,
      "Inserted": 2
    }
  ]
}

And a quick check in the customer posting group shows two new record stubs.