Bad Request – Error in query syntax.

No, this is not an error in WordPress on this server – “Bad Request – Error in query syntax.” is in fact the intended subject for this Blog post :-).

If you are running OData WebServices towards you Microsoft Dynamics NAV or 365 Business Central (DBC) and you get this error – and you have a forward slash ( “/” ) in the company name in question, then this Blog post is for you :-).

You have just discovered that Excel, PowerShell.exe and/or older version of PowerShell ISE cannot work with OData URLs with a forward slash in the …/Company(‘<my company name>’)/… part of the URL.

A obvious solution is to rename the company in NAV/DBC – but that is not really a neat solution, is it?

According to this Microsoft blog post, another far superior solution exists. NAV/DBC supports two syntaxes when stating the company name.

The “classic” one you use for OData version 3 when you got the error:

https://<my hostname>:<my odata port>/<my instance>/OData/Company('<my company')/<my webservice>

…or the corresponding OData version 4 one:

https://<my hostname>:<my odata port>/<my instance>/ODataV4/Company('<my company')/<my webservice>

…and another one for working around this error:

https://<my hostname>:<my odata port>/<my instance>/OData/<my webservice>?company='<my company>'

…or the corresponding OData version 4 one:

https://<my hostname>:<my odata port>/<my instance>/ODataV4/<my webservice>?company='<my company>'

Note that you can off cause add additonal parameters (selecting tenant or setting filters etc.) to the URL using the ampersand sign ( “&” ) – just like you do when construction any URL.

Congratulations – you solved your problem 🙂

If you want to learn more about OData towards NAV/DBC, I suggest you visit these links:

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