Contoso Demo Data Tool and How to Create Custom one

The demo tool and data for service scenarios in Business Central help partners demonstrate its advanced capabilities. The Contoso Coffee app provides setup and demo data, supporting various service scenarios such as creating service items, placing loaners, registering time, invoicing, and managing service contracts. The tool identifies dependencies automatically and allows configurations per module.

You have initially Contoso Coffee Demo Dataset, and for different country localizations you will need additional app which adds country specific content on top of the base application. Those localizations Apps can be installed from AppSource:

Upon creating Business Central SaaS environment, you will get by default Contoso Coffee Demo Dataset app, if you are running supported localization, you will get one more app in addition for the localization part. For example:

For created DE Sandbox, we automatically get Contoso Coffee Demo Dataset (This app delivers demo data for the base application) and one more for DE Localization (This app adds country-specific content on top of the base application).

If you are missing Contoso Coffiee Demo Dataset app, you can install it as YZhums described ways to install AppSource Apps, for this one you can use:

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Upon creating new company in Evaluation or Production:

There is additional Boolean to check if you would like to install Contoso Demo Data App.

💡 Point of this Demo Tool is also to move away slowly from using Rapid Start Packages to generate demo data.

In future point will be to have possibility to choose which Demo Data Modules you would like to generate, since Rapid Start won’t be used for that part anymore.

You can access it simply by searching for Demo Tool:

By default, currently there are following demo data modules covered:

💡 More Demo Data modules are coming.

Currently you can read more about Manufacturing, Warehousing and Service Module scenarios for demo data here. Jeremy Vyska has created additional documentation for Service and Jobs scenario, Pull Request is still open but you can expect soon enough to be available on Docs.

Starting from Common Module, it’s used to prepare general settings that Business Central requires. For example, things like number series. Note that Common Module contains supplementary data for the Warehouse, Manufacturing, Service scenarios only. It is not recommended to run it in isolation.

For Common Module you can go to Configure to setup parameters which will be used for Demo Data generation:

Speaking about Localization Demo Data App on top, if we go to Warehouse Module Setup and click on Configure:

You can notice that Location Names are created in German, and whole Demo Data is adjusted to German localization.

Technical part

Its OPENSOURCED! You can get more insights on GitHub if you want to get deeper look into functionality:

Data layer’s structure is split to:

• Setup
• Master
• Transactional
• Historical

And structure of each module should follow that, for example in Fixed Assed Module:

Inside each module on main level codeunit you can take a look on procedures CreateSetupData, CreateMasterData, CreateHistoricalData, and CreateTransactionalData. On that way you will know what data is created.

💡 Demo Data Modules should work together and separately!

Create Custom Demo Data Module

Define dependency to Contoso Coffee Demo Dataset:

Create first Enum Extension on Contoso Demo Data Module:

Than move on custom Codeunit which implements Contoso Demo Data Module interface:

Publish the App and you will see new Demo Data Module in the page:

Try it out for your apps and get most of this functionality!