Data Management, OData, and Office

Data integration with other applications is a very important part of Finance and Supply Chain Management (SCM). It is a cloud-first ERP solution, and this means that it has to provide secure ways to manage its data. As part of the implementation data usually has to be imported, and after that, we will often wish to import and export data from SCM, we may also wish to integrate with other applications, such as Excel, or access data from SCM in our internal on-premise applications.

Although SCM provides many data integration features out of the box, we will usually have to extend or write new entities. The topics covered in this chapter provide the recipes that are commonly used to access our data in terms of both integration and for use in Edit in Excel experiences. The following topics are covered:

• Creating a data entity with an Edit in Excel...

Technical requirement

You can find the code files of this chapter on GitHub at the links given here:

• https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Extending-Microsoft-Dynamics-365-Finance-and-Supply-Chain-Management-Cookbook-Second-Edition/blob/master/Chapter%2010%20ConODataTest.zip
• https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Extending-Microsoft-Dynamics-365-Finance-and-Supply-Chain-Management-Cookbook-Second-Edition/blob/master/Chapter%2010.axpp

Introduction

Since Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management is a cloud solution, we can't integrate directly with our local area network. Even though ports could be opened in order to do this, it opens an unnecessary security risk. Even when deployed on a local business data (on-premise), we should still use the same patterns as used in the cloud. This would aid fail-over scenarios should Azure be our Disaster Recovery (DR) solution or should we wish to move to the cloud at a later date.

All integrations should have a service endpoint that will be accessed by SCM.

To facilitate writing integrations that are agnostic of the local network resources, Microsoft has evolved the Data Import/Export Framework (DIXF) in this release to help resolve many of the integrations issues we often face. It also opens up a much more integrated way in which we can communicate...

Creating a data entity with an Edit in Excel experience

In this task, we will create a data entity for our vehicle table, which we will extend in order to demonstrate how data entities can be used. We will also use this to allow us to maintain vehicle data through the Office add-in and make it a public OData entity.

Getting ready

We will just need to have an SCM project open, and a table for which we want to create a data entity.

How to do it...

To create the data entity, follow these steps:

1. Before we start, we need to check that the table we are going to use has a natural...

Extending standard data entities

Extensibility is becoming more and more pervasive in the development paradigm of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management, and it is important to be able to have extensible data entities; otherwise, we would have to write new ones to be able to use a field we added to a table as an extension.

In this example, we will create an extension for the Released product creation entity, named EcoResReleasedProductCreationEntity.

Getting ready

Part of this recipe is to add an extension field so we can import data into it, so the first part is to create an extension for the InventTable table with a new field. This is optional but is included in order to demonstrate how this is done.

To follow...

Importing data through the Data Import/Export Framework

This recipe is usually a system administration function but is needed in order to test our data entities. It also gives us more insight into understanding how our data entities work.

Getting ready

This recipe follows on from the previous one, where we are testing a data entity extension. The steps here can be used with any data entity.

How to do it...

To import and export data using the DIXF, follow these steps:

1. Open Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management in a supported browser (IE, Edge, or Chrome...

Reading, writing, and updating data through OData

In this example, we will create a sample OData console application in order to demonstrate how to connect to and communicate through OData.

In order to start, you will need to create an application within your organization's Azure ID. You will need the application ID—an official guide as to how to do this is available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/data-entities/services-home-page.

Getting ready

The following doesn't have to be done in the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management development virtual machine. However, it will need to have access to the URL.

...