Business Central Virtual Entities or Virtual Table help needee

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Posted on by MahGah

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Can someone please let me know what is a different between Virtual Entities and Virtual Table in Business Central SaaS? Are they the same?

Also, what "Business Central Virtual Table" does? Is this app uses all BC API to create virtual table in Dataverse? Or it sync all BC tables into Dataverse?

if I add to record in those Virtual Tables in Dataverse then those change sync back to BC? I mean let say I sync those tables in Dataverse with some other tables then do those changes write back into BC?

Thanks

appsource.microsoft.com/.../microsoftdynsmb.businesscentral_virtualentity

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MahGah 15,435 on at

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RE: Business Central Virtual Entities or Virtual Table help needee

Thanks Anita75 this was really helpful. I thought CRM->BC is OOTB but looks like many functions are missing. I realized if I convert Quote to SO etc thentwo systems are not in sync any more.

I wanted to use those table to link to other tables such as Salesforce in Dataverse and then sync them back to BC. Looks like this is possible but with lots of challenges
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YUN ZHU 78,824 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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RE: Business Central Virtual Entities or Virtual Table help needee

Hi, Sorry I haven't researched the backend, but I think it doesn't use standard APIs, it may use standard Dataverse connectors (TableType = CDS). This connector is bidirectionally syncable.
Something like the following example
https://yzhums.com/17065/

Here is a description of the settings, you can test it.
https://www.fajdiga.info/blog/2021/05/03/dynamics-365-business-central-and-microsoft-dataverse-virtual-entities/

PS: As far as I know, this feature is still in the preview stage and may be available in the Production environment this year.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/powerplatform/powerplat-admin-reference

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

ZHU
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Anita75 1,159 on at

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RE: Business Central Virtual Entities or Virtual Table help needee

Virtual tables in dataverse can be accessed and modified and the data will be synched backed to BC. However if you are looking it from a CRM point of view it's not easy to implement the logic since Dynamics CRM workflow and data structures differ from BC, for example sale quote in CRM contains versions and different status than in BC where it gets archived. Each time I customize the CRM -->BC I know I'm opening a can of worms
MahGah 15,435 on at

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RE: Business Central Virtual Entities or Virtual Table help needee

Thanks yzhums

This was really helpful. I wonder about those Virtual Table in Dataverse. Do you know if they use "standard" api (OOTB) or use something different? Also if we make change in Dataverse tables are they sync back to BC?
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YUN ZHU 78,824 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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RE: Business Central Virtual Entities or Virtual Table help needee

Hi, as far as I understand, Virtual Table should refer to some tables with more than 2000000000.

Virtual Tables: A virtual table contains system information. You cannot change the data in virtual tables. You can only read the information. Virtual tables are not stored in the database but are computed by Dynamics NAV at run time.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-nav/virtual-tables

Below is the point mentioned in Microsoft documentation:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-view-table-data#constraints

In NAV:

https://ksdconsultancy.blog/2015/08/11/how-to-list-virtual-tables-in-navision/

And, In this wave (BC22), Microsoft also added a new virtual table.

New virtual table to support Language selection

https://yzhums.com/36738/

But as you know, the meaning of this seems to have changed since the release of the Dataverse Integration.

Integrating with Microsoft Power Platform -> Business Central Virtual Tables FAQ:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/powerplatform/powerplat-faq

Update a session in Business Central Launch Event 2023 wave 1

What's new in Virtual Table for Microsoft Dataverse: https://app.hopin.com/events/business-central-launch-event-4eb37891-3940-40a3-a49d-b48c6350c82d/replay

Hope this can give you some hints.

Thanks.

ZHU