When developing reports in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, performance and scalability are crucial—especially in cloud environments where system efficiency impacts everything from responsiveness to cost. One often-overlooked feature that can significantly enhance report performance is the DataAccessIntent property.

What Is DataAccessIntent?

The DataAccessIntent property is available on report objects in AL. It specifies how a report should access the database—whether it’s read-only or read-write.

The property supports two values:

• DataAccessIntent = ReadOnly
• DataAccessIntent = ReadWrite

ReadOnly

When you set DataAccessIntent = ReadOnly, you are explicitly telling the platform that your report only needs to read data from the database and will not perform any write operations.

Why is this important?

• Better Performance: In Business Central SaaS, reports marked as ReadOnly can run on read-only replicas of the database. This reduces the load on the primary (read-write) database and enhances scalability.
• Improved Report Execution Time: Since queries are routed to optimized replicas, report rendering can be faster and more efficient.

ReadWrite

If your report needs to modify data during execution—a rare scenario—you should use DataAccessIntent = ReadWrite. This forces the report to run on the primary database.

However, you should avoid using ReadWrite unless absolutely necessary because:

• It eliminates the benefit of using read replicas.
• It may degrade performance, especially under high concurrency.

When to Use Each

Scenario	Use ReadOnly?	Use ReadWrite?
Standard data listing/reporting	✅	❌
Reports that update records	❌	✅
Diagnostic or audit reports	✅	❌

How to Set DataAccessIntent in AL

report 50100 "Customer Balance Report"
{
    DataAccessIntent = ReadOnly;

    dataset
    {
        dataitem(Customer; Customer)
        {
            column(Name; Name) { }
            column(Balance; "Balance (LCY)") { }
        }
    }

    layout
    {
        // Define RDLC or Word layout
    }
}

By default, if you don’t specify the property, it behaves as ReadWrite. So it’s a good practice to explicitly set it to ReadOnly when applicable.

Important Considerations

• The DataAccessIntent property is only a hint to the Business Central server. The server may not always be able to use a read-only replica, even if the property is set to ReadOnly.
• If a report with DataAccessIntent set to ReadOnly attempts to modify data, a runtime error will occur.
• The DataAccessIntent property can be overridden by the user through the “Database Access Intent List” page in Business Central.

In short: if your report doesn’t write data, use DataAccessIntent = ReadOnly. It’s an easy win for performance and best practice compliance.

Stay tuned for more….