Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Dataverse virtual entities

Hi,

after my last blog post about the Dynamics 365 Business Central and the Power BI integration, I will continue with another blog post from the Power Platform series of blog posts.

In this blog post, I will show you how you can configure from scratch integration between Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Dataverse for standard entities.

The first step is to navigate to your Power Platform environment and then select Dynamics 365 Apps and click Open AppSource

After that, we need to install the Business Central Virtual Table (Preview) app. As the name suggests this feature is still in preview.

After you click the Get it now button you will be redirected to the Power Platform Admin Center, and a new pop-up will open.

In a new pop-up, you should select your Power Platform environment for which you want to enable Business Central Virtual Table (Preview) app.

In a few seconds list of all applications on your Power Platform environment will open and you will see Business Central Virtual Table (Preview) app in Status Installing.

After few minutes, refresh your browser and installation should be done, and Status will be Installed.

The next step is to navigate to Microsoft Dataverse tables and find the Business Central Virtual Data Source Configuration table. Make sure you filtered All in the upper right corner.

After opening the Business Central Virtual Data Source Configuration table, navigate to the Data, select Business Central, and click Edit record.

A new tab will open with information about your Business Central. In the window specify the Environment name and the Default company. Confirm changes by clicking Save & Close.

The next step is to configure Azure Active Directory Applications in the Dynamics 365 Business Central. For that navigate to the Dynamics 365 Business Central and search for the Azure Active Directory Applications. When the new screen opens, in the State field select Enabled. hint: in some clients, this was the first step before the step above. 

Now when we have all setup done, we need to enable virtual entities that will pull data to Microsoft Dataverse. To do that I will go to Microsoft Dataverse tables and find the table called Available Business Central Table. Similarly to the step with opening Business Central Virtual Data Source Configurator, I will open the table Available Business Central Table and click Data

Here you will get a list of all standard and custom entities (I will show you this in my next blog post). To enable standard Dynamics 365 Business Central entity inside Microsoft Dataverse you should select one of the entities, for example, Customer, and click Edit record.

In the new window, you will see basic information about the Dynamics 365 Business Central entity. Here click Visible and after that Save & Close.

After few seconds in the list of Microsoft Dataverse tables, you will find a Customer entity with the name dyn365bc_customer_v2_0. In this case, you will know that this entity is created from the Dynamics 365 Business Central list of entities.

Now click Customer, and again Data and Microsoft Dataverse will show you all customers from Dynamics 365 Business Central. In case you don’t see all fields, change in the upper right corner view.

If I compare the view with what I have in Dynamics 365 Business Central Cronus UK company I will see that it is the same list of customers.

Now I can edit my customer in Dynamics 365 Business Central and this modification will be instantly available in Microsoft Dataverse.

One last tip I would like to show you is, that an, Account in Microsoft Dataverse is not the same as an Account in Dynamics 365 Business Central. In Dynamics 365 Business Central, the Account table represents a chart of accounts (1), while in Microsoft Dataverse it stores information about accounts (customers, etc) from D365 (2).

Here is the list of Accounts from the Dynamics 365 Business Central entity.

That is why it is important to pay attention to the table name.

Also, when you open each table you can notice that standard Microsoft Dataverse is type Standard table.

While Dynamics 365 Business Central Account table is type Virtual table.

Hint: if you don’t see your entity in the list of tables, try to refresh the whole browser.

I hope you find this blog post useful and in my next blog post, I will write how to work with custom entities.

Br,

Renato 🙂

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Original Post https://www.fajdiga.info/blog/2021/05/03/dynamics-365-business-central-and-microsoft-dataverse-virtual-entities/