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when we should choose a Custom service or Odata

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Posted on by CU10121822-0

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Hi team,

As per my recent post , i almost cleared about to implement Odata and Custom services.

I some time confused , which approach to choose when? Either I go for Odata or Custom services.

Pls advise, when we should choose OData and when we should choose a custom service. Pls provide me an appropriate example of each.

Pls advise, thanks

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Dynamics 365 Finance

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Martin Dráb 240,624 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Please explain what you mean by OData. CRUD operations on data entities? OData actions? Data management package API, which is an OData service too?

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CU-1234529-002 320 on at

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Hi, good question. Simple rule of thumb
Use OData when you need standard CRUD operations (read, create, update, delete) on existing D365FO entities. Example: external system reads customer list, creates a sales order, or updates an item price. No custom logic needed, just data in/out.
Use Custom Service when you need complex business logic, multiple operations in one call, or the data doesn't map cleanly to a single entity. Example: external system sends an order, and D365FO needs to validate stock, calculate price, apply trade agreements and confirm all in one API call. OData can't handle that cleanly.
In most cases OData is enough only go for custom service when OData's standard entity methods can't cover the requirement. Thanks,

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Martin Dráb 240,624 Most Valuable Professional on at

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As usual, the answer by @CU-1234529-002 is completely wrong. It ignores the fact that you may have business logic in data entities, it forgot OData actions etc. It claims that you can't call complex business logic via OData, but you surely can, both by data entities and OData actions.

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André Arnaud de Cal... 307,003 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Hi,
You can read more about all possible integration patterns and examples on this page: Integration between finance and operations apps and third-party services - Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
Some additional thoughts… With OData you are bound to one main table. There can be some related records included to retrieve field values from other tables. With a custom service, you can implement multiple methods that can be called. You can have a look at e.g. the service for timesheets (TsTimesheetService). This service has methods implemented to interact with e.g. timesheet periods, resources, timesheet headers and lines. It also has some validation logic.
With OData you can add computed columns and actions, but limited to one main source table. A service can provide a list of related methods and actions in one service.

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