Business Central Virtual Entities and CDS
God morning,
It’s been a while since I wrote and I disappeared from the communities because I was sick, Covid unfortunately hit me too. After about 17 days of severe illness, I am slowly recovering, now I feel better.
Covid is a disease that I do NOT recommend to anyone, it is really bad, at least in my case; I am still positive but I hope to negativize myself soon.
Having said that … let’s go on …
In this post we mention the Virtual Entities (in preview mode) that will soon change the approach for integrations between Business Central and Common data services, in addition to the use of Web Services and OData.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Virtual Entities in Microsoft Dataverse
“Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Virtual Entity is a virtual data source in Microsoft Dataverse allowing Create, Read, Update and Delete operations from Microsoft Dataverse against Dynamics 365 Business Central. Data for virtual entities do not reside in Microsoft Dataverse, but continues to reside in Business Central. Virtual entities are enabled for Business Central APIs, by making them available in Microsoft Dataverse as virtual entities. APIs exposed in Business Central are consumed on Microsoft Dataverse and exposed as virtual entities.”
APPSOURCE link
About Business Central Virtual Entities in CDS
The use of “virtual entities” greatly simplifies access to external data, it is current practice to use it with visual studio, business central and power platform environments to adapt to the thing; integration with CDS (Common data service is complete). The version is still in preview and not available in all regions, it will be soon.
A Virtual Entity is a custom entity in Common Data Service (CDS) that has fields containing data from an external data source; Entity represents a database table and each field within an entity represents a column in that table. Open Data Protocol (OData) entities exposed through APIs in Business Central can be used as virtual entities in CDS.
Installing and Configuring….
LINKS
FAQs
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/powerplatform/powerplat-faq
Dear Robert, thank you for this very helpful blog post. We followed your post step-by-step. Out aim was to query the data stores in BC, published via Virtual Entitys in SMSS. However those published Virtual Entitys are not shown in the list of avaibable tables. Do you know any workaround to see those tables in the SQL Management Studio? Any tip would be helpful! Thanks alot.
Carissimo buongiorno! Vorrei capire una cosa , ho installato la solution sul dataverse ed e’ tutto installato correttamente lato dynamics crm,ma non vedo le virtual entities…. o meglio mi da errore lato bc cosa devo fare?