The new CDS 2.0 in the April '18 Release (Part 2)

In Part 1 of the series "The new CDS 2.0 in the April '18 Release" we have discussed the dramatic re-design of CDS 2.0 when compared to CDS 1.0.

This blog post follows on the same topic of Part 1 but now with some hands-on examples of the new features.

First we starting by creating a new Entity in the PowerApps Web Portal: https://web.powerapps.com In my case I have created a CDS entity to store student information, with some fields of interest.

Once you are ready from designing your entity ensure that you click on the "Save Entity" button on the bottom right of your browser. As discussed in Part 1 this will automatically (intrinsically) also create the entity, its fields and any other meta-data in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE app. The entities coming from CDS are created in their own solution (not in the default solution). All this can be seen in the following two screenshots. Also note how the customization area of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE app is now PowerApps branded. ;-)

Once you have created your Main form (for data viewing, input and manipulation) and published your customizations in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE (a process long-established in the Dynamics CRM world), you can go ahead and start creating records. This is shown in the following screenshots.

After saving the record in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE you can switch back to the CDS tab in your browser and, from the "Data" tab, you should find that the new record just created is automatically there without any need to configure or schedule any synchronization! This can be seen in the screenshot below. If this is not the case, you might have to click the "Refresh data" button in the top ribbon menu but in my case this was not needed (I did not even need to refresh the browser page).

When viewing data in CDS you could also switch between the views just as in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE App. This is shown in the screenshot below. Custom views created in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE are also supported of course! You can also import data into CDS using the "Get data" button in the top ribbon. Thus you could potentially have users with a "PowerApps Plan 2 license" importing data into Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE without needed a license for the latter. 

In this post we saw the deep integration between CDS and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE with both data model and data being automatically synchronized between the two. This makes integration scenarios from Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (FinOps) and other external data sources easier then how it was in the past. In the blog post (Part 3) we shall have a look at the direct integration scenarios now available between CE and FinOps.

If you have any questions or comments about any of my posts or anything related to Microsoft Dynamics 365, do not hesitate to get in touch with me on mbonello@bluefort.com.mt