Reference · Our own Business Central app
Typing a Dutch address by hand takes time and now and then goes wrong. AdresDirect 365 is the Business Central app that takes this over: whoever types a post code and a house number on a customer, vendor or contact gets the street, city and province from the BAG, the Dutch address register of the Kadaster. Free, with the customer's own API key, and straight from Business Central to the Kadaster.
Someone types a post code and a house number on a customer, for example 1071XX and 1, and leaves the field.
Business Central looks the address up in the BAG directly, with the customer's own API key, and waits five seconds at most.
Address, City and County fill in and the post code becomes 1071 XX. If several addresses fit, the user picks one.
The post code found goes into the standard Post Codes table, so a known post code costs no request after that.
Van Oosten Software built the app for its own work in Business Central and for that of its customers. Typing a Dutch address by hand is slow, and errors creep in: a street name with a typo, a city that does not belong to the post code.
Business Central's own post code table only goes part of the way: for a post code it gives a city, never a street. The street still comes from the memory of whoever is typing. So AdresDirect 365 looks the whole Dutch address up in the BAG of the Kadaster.
AdresDirect 365 works in the standard screens of Business Central; it adds one field, House No. These are the screens of the user and of the administrator, taken in a Business Central sandbox with the English client and a real API key.
On the customer card the user types post code 1071XX and house number 1. As soon as they leave the field, the app fills in Address, City and County from the BAG and writes the post code as 1071 XX. With a post code alone, City and County come in.
Street and house number from the BAG: Museumstraat 1, with Amsterdam as the city.
Typed as 1071XX, written as 1071 XX.
The House No. field, which the app adds right after Post Code.
The House No. field and the lookup are not only on the customer card. They work the same way in seven places where Business Central records an address.
The app matches house letters and additions however they are typed: 12a, 12 - 2 or 12B bis. When no address fits exactly, the user decides. At post code 7311 KP, house number 17 exists only as Hofstraat 17A and 17B, and both are in the Pick an Address list.
A wrong key, an address the BAG does not know, or five seconds without an answer: the fields stay as they were, and a notification says why. Saving is never blocked. Here the user typed post code 7311 KP with house number 1, an address the BAG does not know.
The notification says why: the BAG has no address at 7311 KP 1.
Address and city stay as they were.
The typed post code stays too; the user can correct it or simply save.
The app is listed in Business Central's Manual Setup. On AdresDirect 365 Setup the administrator pastes their own API key from the Kadaster, chooses Test Connection and switches the app on. Request an API Key opens the Kadaster's request form.
Test Connection sends one request with the stored key to the BAG.
The key is stored encrypted per company and is not shown again once saved.
The BAG's answer: the key was accepted.
A post code table gives a city, not a street. So AdresDirect 365 looks the whole address up where it is kept: in the BAG of the Kadaster. That means the app works for Dutch addresses only, but it fills in the whole address, down to the province.
The BAG itself has no provinces. A table of 4,086 four-digit areas, built from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0), gives the province for the post code.
The Kadaster's key is meant for single lookups: at most 50,000 a day and 50 a second, no bulk. So by default the app only looks up while someone types. Whoever wants imports or integrations looked up too switches on Look Up for Imports and APIs.
28 automated tests run against a mocked BAG. The build runs through Microsoft's code analyzers and lets not a single warning through. After that the app was tested live against the BAG, in a Business Central sandbox with a real key; the screens on this page come from there.
A lookup is a help, not a condition. These are the rules laid down in the code.
A wrong key, an unknown address or no answer within five seconds: the fields stay as they were, and a notification says why. The app holds nobody up.
The request goes from the customer's Business Central directly to the Kadaster. There is no server of Van Oosten Software in between.
Each customer requests a free API key from the Kadaster, with its request form. On working days it usually arrives within an hour.
The key is stored encrypted per company. Once saved, the setup page no longer shows it.
By default the app only looks up while someone types. For imports and integrations it does so only when the administrator switches on Look Up for Imports and APIs, because the key is not meant for bulk.
Every post code found goes into Business Central's Post Codes table. A post code that is already there costs no request.
AdresDirect 365 version 2.0 is free and on its way to AppSource: Microsoft has assigned the object range, the builds are signed and the submission is in progress. The manual, the release notes, the licence terms and the privacy statement are on this site.
For whoever records addresses in Business Central, the work hardly changes: the same cards, one more field. Only the address now comes from the BAG, and not from the memory of whoever is typing.
Standard Business Central and one source outside it: the BAG of the Kadaster, called directly. No server in between.
Tell me which data you now enter by hand. I will tell you honestly whether an integration or an extension of your own is worth it, or whether something that will do already exists.