Category: CDS

PowerBI Connector – CDS for Apps

Recently they added a new connector for PowerBI – and you may want to use it in place of your Dynamics 365 connector!

Here are some of the key benefits:

Improved performance

Data load and refresh times will be decreased. This was a big pain point with the D365 connector when working with large datasets.

Sorting the entities by custom and system entities

When you decide to bring in tables, you can see which entities are system and which are custom from the data table selector.

Friendly option set values

Options sets will show up as their friendly values. Before, you would have to build a table with the Value and Name and merge it with the entity table to get the friendly values.

Alphabetical order of column names in tables

This was one of my biggest pain points because the columns seemed to show up in no particular order using the D365 connector. With the CDS Connector, the columns will be in alphabetical order when you need to edit the queries.

What is the Common Data Model?

For those who want a quick answer:

The Common Data Model (CDM) is a standardized, modular, extensible collection of data schemas published by Microsoft that are designed to make it easier for you to build, use, and analyze data. This collection of predefined schemas—consisting of entities, attributes, semantic metadata and relationships—represent commonly used concepts and activities, such as Account and Campaign, to simplify the creation, aggregation, and analysis of data. – Microsoft 

For those looking for more detail:

The CDM is a common data structure that you should use to build out all of your business applications for consistency in entities, attributes and relationships.

For example:

Scenario 1: You’re a company that sells and manufactures widgets. Your sales, manufacturing and accounting departments all manage their own business processes and data within their own application. That’s 3 applications. AKA your IT departments worst nightmare. And each individual application may have different data structure and records for the same Accounts data. Sending/receiving data from one system to another may require custom attribute mapping and some data may not make it.

Scenario 2: You’re a company that has motivated executives who have had their ears to the ground on Microsoft’s digital transformation message. You also sell and manufacture widgets. You have since converted all of your business applications into the CDM and your Sales, Manufacturing and Accounting teams all share the same set of Account data. No integration needs to take place and your IT department’s business expense for Advil has gone to $0. Building out additional business applications is a breeze – since the core of your application has already been built for you.

Which company do you think has the leg up on their competition?

Use the CDS trigger to set the scope of your flow

Chances are if you are reading this, you know that new and upgraded instances of Dynamics 365 are now synonymous with the Common Data Service. And because of this the D365 and CDS Flow triggers can work on the same data.

There may be an circumstance where you want to create a Flow that only runs when YOU update or create a record. With the D365 connector – this is not possible. The trigger will run on any record that is created/updated.

BUT if you use the CDS trigger, you get more options! You can set the scope of the trigger to “user” – and if you select that option it will only run for records that YOU trigger.

A pretty handy trick to keep in your back pocket.