Entity Relationship Diagram in D365F&O

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) is a structural diagram that is useful in database design.

It shows how an entity is connected with one or more entities. To be precise, it helps us to understand the inheritance and the relationship between the tables.

Previous version of Dynamics Ax(4.0) had this option which helped to generate the required output for the data model. In simple words, the ERD using Reverse Engineering tool would have the following steps:

• Create a project and add the entities (tables here) which the user is keen on understanding the details
• Right click on the project and click ‘Add-ins’ where the option ‘Reverse Engineer’ is displayed. On specifying the File path and name and selecting the model type, ERD is generated.

Now, let us continue on achieving the same in D365F&O where this option is deprecated.

Go to Github and download the Visual Studio extension . Follow the below steps and upon completion of the installation, users will be able to generate an entity relation schema for D365F&O using DBML (Database Markup Language).

Installation:

From the above path, download the latest extension.

Steps to install are already mentioned. But I was stuck in the step where I missed to unblock the extension due to which the option was missing in my first attempt.

After the file path is modified in ‘DynamicsDevConfig.XML’ , Visual studio was restarted and the option is visible.

This option is available at the table level as well.

User has the option to select the following based on the business need.

• Adding / Removing individual tables
• Adding all tables that have an inbound relation to the selected table
• Adding all tables that have an outbound relation from the selected table
• Adding all related tables for all tables in the list
• Ignoring staging tables
• Ignoring self references
• Reducing the complexity of the schema by only including key fields

Upon selecting ‘Add inward relations’, it shows the tables which has reference to ‘CustGroup’

Outward relations looks like

Click ‘Generate DBML’ which takes few seconds to display the ‘dbml’ format. The file also mentions the tool which converts dbml to ERD.

Navigate to dbdiagram.io

Upon pasting the dbml to the editor, it converts to a readable ERD.