Hello World,
I consider my self lucky as I am getting to experience the new features of the Microsoft CDS V2 (spring update) releases fresh out of their oven, under technical preview for about a year now. It's quite fascinating to see how it grows into a highly capable product gradually.
Microsoft's original definition of CDS: "The Common Data Service is the Microsoft Azure-based business application platform that enables you to easily build and extend applications with their business data. The Common Data Service does the heavy lifting of bringing together your data from across the Dynamics 365 family of services so you can focus on building and delivering the apps, insights and process automation that matter to you and your customers with PowerApps, Power BI, and Microsoft Flow."
Now this post is about the data integration between Dynamics 365 (CRM) and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (AX) using CDS, as it work for bringing the Dynamics 365 family together.
The Data Integration feature is currently available as a tab in the PowerApps Admin Center. Microsoft uses a feature flag to enable Data Integration for technical preview. So we go as, https://preview.admin.powerapps.com/environments?feature.showDataIntegration=true
The basic setup for integration is as below diagram,
Prerequisites to use CDS for Data Integration
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (AX), Enterprise edition July 2017 update with Platform update 8 (App 7.2.11792.56024 w/ Platform 7.0.4565.16212). Support for App 7.1 will be added with a hotfix. Or,
- Dynamics 365 Sales, Enterprise Edition (CRM). The integration solution is compatible with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Version 1612 (8.2.1.207) (DB 8.2.1.207) online.
And, you must also have:
An environment in the Common Data Service. The environment must have a database for integration and you must be an environment administrator for that database.
First thing to setup are the Connections. For that you have to setup Connections for both source and target environments using normal power apps connection tab.
Then go to the PowerApps Admin Center and create the Connection Set by giving Source and Target Environment Connections.
Okay now all done to Create a project. Here you can select any template Microsoft has already published with complete data mappings, or you can create your own Custom Template.
For now Microsoft Templates are available for CRM and AX Sales, FSA and PSA Combinations and I have witnessed it growing for the past few months.
Sales Integration Map
To use Microsoft Templates for Sales, you have to add Prospect to Cash Integration Solution (Which is very bulky) into your Dynamics 365 environment. Yet it's not required if you know how to manage data integration with keys. Therefore I went with my custom maps with small configuration changes in CRM side (like just adding a ContactNumber field in CRM to map with AX Contact Number).
FSA Integration Map
PSA Integration Map
Good Documentation of the Data mapping between Dynamics 365 and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations can be found in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/dev-itpro/data-entities/data-integration-cds?toc=/fin-and-ops/toc.json
Now with the showDataIntegration=true, feature flag the new feature available is the Advance Query option.
In the Advance Query View you get freedom to use Power Query Language ( M Language) and apply various Filters and Queries for Source Data (Working on this Advance Query section kind of feels like old SSIS, if you know what I mean :) ). Reference to Power Query can be found in https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/query-bi/m/power-query-m-reference.
There's more to tell about advance querying. Next post for sure.
Thanks for reading, if you came this long. :)
