Last week I had an issue with DataEvents. We hav made a change to an entity in FnO and we wanted the new fields for be visible in the JSON message sent by Data Events. We did not get the correct information in the JSON message. This did not work… I tested the following tips
– Refresh the entity list – Refresh the entity Mappings – Reactivated the Data Event – Rebuild business event catalog (from the manage tab in Business Events Catalog) – Did an DMF export to verify that the data is correct – I checked the OData feed from FnO and the fields looked OK. Dataevents use Virtual Entities and Virtual Entities are based on OData
When I Look in Dataverse the added fields are not visible… strange… No wonder the message is not correct.
What you need to do to get this working is that you need to go to Advanced find in CRM/CE and find the entity in Available Finance and Operation Entities. Open it by clicking on it.
The next part is a little hidden… If you click the — besides Refresh, it will turn into a checkbox
Check it and then click Save
NOTE: When I did this the first few times it did not work. I am not positive why but I think it might be because did not wait for it to finish saving completely. Let it take its time… get a coffee (or other beverage of choice)
Once you have done this, go back to the maker portal and verify that the field is visible there
In a previous article I wrote a bit about Data Events in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Data Events is a really simple way to create event-based integrations based on changes in the different data entities in FnO. The Data Events functionality is based on functionality in Power Platform. The setup requires the installation of the Finance and Operations Virtual Entity solution in the Power Platform environment connected to FnO. When you create a trigger Data Event it also created a virtual entity in DataVerse. This creates a couple of challenges when it comes to refreshing databases between environments.
For FnO The settings for the endpoints created in FnO are partially stored in FnO and partially stored in an Azure Key Vault. The settings stored in FnO are amongst others Key Vault URL, App registration ID and Secret. To make sure that these settings do not get extracted from the environment (or accidentally moved to another environment) they are encrypted using an environment specific key and are thus not readable in the destination environment for the refresh. To restore the functionality of Data Events in the destination environment the endpoints need to be removed and recreated. After that has been done, we can re-activate the triggers.
Note that broken endpoints create an issue even if they are not being used. It seems like all endpoints are being validated when you try to create a new one which results in the creation failing.
For DataVerse/CRM Since the functionality of Data Events is based on Virtual Entities created in DataVerse these will be overwritten when a refresh is done from one DataVerse environment to another. The error message you will get when the event is triggered is this:
Response status code does not indicate success: 404 ({“error”:{“code”:”0x80048d02″,”message”:”Virtual entity ‘mserp_vendvendorbankaccountentity’ not found for external entity VendVendorBankAccountEntity”}}).
(of course, with a different entity name based on your scenario)
The solution is to go to the Active Data Events tab in the Business Events workspace and remove and recreate each Data Event Trigger.
Note. You might have to wait a moment (1 minuter or so) before you recreate the trigger in order for everything to be properly cleaned in DataVerse.
Note: I have not been able to verify what happens if the identical triggers are set up in both source and destination environments. It might be that there are no issues or we might have the same issue. If anyone knows, please let me know 🙂
Lessons Learned: There has always been a lot to think about when you do refreshes… And DataVerse integration/DualWrite adds even more. There is a great article by Faisal Fareed here that detail steps that needs to be done for DualWrite integrated environments.
Yesterday I looked into an issue for one of my customers. In one of their environments they where not able to activate Data Events for any of their entities. The Activate button was completely grayed out and the “Active Data Events” and “Inactive Data Events” tabs did not exist
This is an environment where we are currently running a PoC for DualWrite so I just “assumed” that I had configured PowerPlatform correctly (you know what we say about assumptions)
Turns out I had not followed my own advice and done the PowerPlatform configuration from LCS… Instead I did the linking from within FnO, in the DataManagement workspace.
The solution was to go through the linking wizard in LCS and then the tabs showed up
Note that the change to the Business Events Screen is not instant… I had to have it sitting over night to have the tabs show up
This is a (probably the first) post to try to sort out my experiences around setting up a DataVerse connection to a Finance and Operations environment and figuring out how this interacts with Power Platform Admin Center, LCS and DualWrite.
Background
DualWrite is Microsofts go-to solution for integrating Dynamics 365 CE and Dynamics 365 FnO. It uses Dataverse and PowerPlatform extensively which means that we are, in all essences, merging two separate products into one, which creates some challenges.
Since Microsoft is in the middle of a “Convergence” transition when it comes to managing these things I realize that this is a moving target at the moment, which is why I will need to come back to this this eventually.
This article will address some of the challenges that we have experienced, setting up DualWrite.
Since my primary focus is FnO I will start there.
There are a lot of clues to the fact that Microsoft sees PowerPlatform and DataVerse as an integral part of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. The first one you will notice is that you get the option to create a Power Platform environment when you create a new FnO environment. Another lead is that none of the microservice add-ins that you can deploy from LCS are available to deploy it you have not connected your environment to Power Platform.
There are two different ways to create the DualWrite setup. Setting up a new, empty Environment when deploying a new FnO environment or linking your FnO environment to an existing CRM/CE environment. Please remember that, if you have an existing CRM environment with existing customizations (of a highly customized FnO environment) you should probably think about setting up a proof of concept to evaluate how to handle customizations. Keep in mind that the out-of-box mappings for DualWrite are created for vanilla environments.
Initial Setup
When setting up a new Finance and Operations environment you get the option of also setting up a new connected DataVerse environment. You will not get the option to connect an existing environment. You are able to opt out of this setup at the time of deployment if you want.
Regardless of what you choose the environment will be created and connected from the Power Platform side. On the LCS side there is no indication of any DataVerse environment.
Connecting to PowerPlatform
NOTE: This decision is IRREVERSIBLE. Once you have linked your FnO environment to a Power Platform environment there is no supported way to unlink it.
Once the environment is set up LCS offers an option to set up the DataVerse Connection. You can use the one provisioned for you, if you are not using CRM or if you are not planning to use DualWrite to interface with CRM, or you can link it to your existing Dynamics 365 for Sales (CRM) environment. Even though the connection is done to your existing/live CRM environment the operation should be safe since the Power Platform are being deployed to another “partition” of the environment. I know, the message in the upper right corner looks a bit scarry…
This operation only enabled the install of add-ins, DualWrite still needs to be set up from within FnO when you are ready for it.
Lessons Learned
Since Microsoft is currently moving the management experience of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations environments to the Power Platform Admin Center, all of this is a changing scenario and I think what we are seeing is a transition to what is about to come.
Key Take-Aways
Do a gradual rollout, starting with some entities
If there is data that does not need to be synchronized, a different solution such as virtual entities or PowerApps could be an idea
Last week Microsoft finally released the complete PDFs with new features of Dynamics 365 and PowerPlatform Wave 1 2020. I browsed through them (all 405 pages of them 🙂 ) to to try to understand where we are going… here are my top 10 12.
Mass deployment of the Warehouse App This gives an organization the ability to use Microsoft Intune (or your favorite MDM solution) to deploy the warehouse app to mobile devices.
The UI will start adapting to the license the user has assigned in order to make the UI “less complex”. This means that there is no longer a possibility to get by under licensed”.
The new grid now allows you to group rows based on a column and also to easily rearrange the columns.
Tables, Entities and Aggregate measurements can be stored in Data Lagke Storage Gen 2. Prior to this release we were only able to store Aggregate Measurements in Data Lakes.
The ability to embed a Power Automate Flow directly in the UI in Dynamics. This flow can be triggered by the end user. This feature is even cooler since it was suggested on the Dynamics Ideas site.
Azure AD sign-in in the POS client. This could previously only be done using a worker ID
The ability to create a PowerApp directly in Microsoft Teams.
Great improvements for running model-driven apps offline. Really cool since this is geared towards mobile front line workers.
Monitor and get insight into usage of your canvas apps using Azure Application Insights.
Power Apps Test Studio is available in General Availability. This gives you the possibility to automate testing and integrate it into Azure DevOps release and Build Pipelines
Simplified expressions in Power Automate. Instead of having to write a complex expression for a string operation there are ready-made blocks for this.
Copy and Paste in the Power Automate designer (Yay)
As you can see this selection of features are quite tech/IT heavy… There are a LOT more app related features in the Wave 2 release. Look through the PDFs linked below to get a grasp on these.
One thing to note is that this is Wave 1… Not everything in Wave 1 is general available or in some cases even in preview… but it is coming. Something to look forward to.
