In Part 2 of this series, we set up the environments involved in the integrations and the PowerApps Connections to each. Here in Part 3 we will set up the Common Data Service (CDS) Data Integrator between Dynamics 365 (D365) Finance and Operations (F&O) and D365 Field Service to support data integration between these systems.
The CDS Data Integrator is used to integrate data with the CDS from a growing set of systems: Dynamics 365 F&O and Customer Engagement (Sales, Field Service, etc.), of course, but many others including competitor systems such as SalesForce, using Microsoft Power Query. An overview by Microsoft of the Data Integrator, including the concepts of Connection Sets, Integration Keys, Projects, and Templates can be found here.
In the early days of CDS more than two years ago, setting up integrations using Data Integrator was quite a chore because it had to be done entirely from scratch. Since then, Microsoft has released several prebuilt integration Project “Templates,” each packaged in D365 CE solutions. These Templates define data mappings and integration keys for many entities in Finance and Operations and Customer Engagement, enabling many standard integrations that can be modified or extended for your unique scenarios. And, fortunately for those of us in Field Service, many Sales and Field Service scenarios are supported.
Let’s put these integration Project Templates to use with a simple scenario: integrating the list of Warehouses maintained in D365 F&O over to D365 Field Service.
Our first step will be to install the Data Integrator solutions that contain the Microsoft Templates: “Prospect to Cash” and “Field Service Integration, Project and Inventory.”
First, check to see if you have either of the integrator solutions installed. If so, they will show in the D365 Admin as “Installed.”
If either does not appear in the list of solutions, or if they show but are not yet “Installed,” follow the steps below.
We now have all of the baseline ingredients to create some useful integrations!
“Connection Sets” are used to match up the data sources involved in Data Integrator integrations, and leverage Connections like the ones we set up in Part 2 of this series. Let’s create a Connection Set to link our F&O and Field Service environments.
Now, we need to create an integration Project using the Connection Set we just defined and one of the Microsoft Integration Project Templates.
As you can see, our example Warehouse integration is very simple with only three fields mapped.
Note that the fields include an “ismaintainedexternally” field that indicates that the data is mastered in the source system – in this case, F&O. This attribute can be useful especially for two-way integrations, such as if, for example, a Warehouse is created in CE (with “ismaintainedexternally” = false), pushed over to F&O using Data Integrator, and then pushed back to CE from F&O to complete the round trip (with “ismaintainedexternally” = true). In a two-way integration, we would typically lock down the fields in CE mastered in F&O when “ismaintainedexternally” is true, in order to maintain data integrity and ownership.
Up to this point, we have installed the Microsoft CDS Data Integrator standard Projects, set up the Connection Set to link our environments, and created the Data Integrator Project. In Part 4, we will finally run the “Warehouse” CDS integration, and then extend it to pull additional useful data from F&O.
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