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What's the best way to data sync between D365 F&O and an external system?

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Posted on by ant-tlc

Hi all, me again, sorry for lots of questions.

First let me describe an overview of what I want to achieve with my D365 app.

1. This should be an app which anyone can install on their D365 F&O instance.

2. The app will push invoices to an external system (this could be one specific for the company or a multi-tenant system) from D365 F&O based on criteria.

I'm only just starting to look at this and haven't done any D365 development before so sorry if it's really simple for a lot of you.

The questions I think I need answering are:

1. Does the above even make sense? Is that possible?

2. How would you normally configure an app like this so that it knows which instance of the external system to call?

3. How would I be able to authenticate with the external system? Am I able to popup/redirect to an oauth flow to get a token?

My main problem so far has been differentiating documentation between "this is how you extend your instance of D365 F&O" and "this is how you extend someone else's instance of D365 F&O". For instance I found some business events documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/business-events/home-page) which seems to only send events to the same tenant as the D365 instance, so not useful in my case.

Many thanks,

Ant.

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vinitgoyal2005 6,332 on at

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Hi,

What do you mean by 'This should be an app which anyone can install on their D365 F&O instance'? Are you talking about Power App?

Have you checked the MS documentation for integration strategy: docs.microsoft.com/.../integration-overview

What is an external system? You can use Power automate/Logic apps to connect to the external system. Power automate/Logic app acts as a middleware.

I am not clear what is the requirement. I suggest you go through the above link and then ask any specific questions you have ( as many as you want).

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nmaenpaa 101,160 Moderator on at

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1. Seems that you would need to develop an ISV solution IN D365FO. So, not a separate app.

2. This would be configured on a parameter / setup form/table that you need to implement in your ISV solution

3. It depends a lot on how you authenticate with the external system. It doesn't seem very user friendly if the users would get some login dialog while workin in D365. So rather you could use one service account / credentials that you set up in the parameters of your application (and perhaps use Azure Key Vault for storing the password).

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Martin Dráb 237,898 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Did you consider the other direction as well? Instead of "The app will push invoices to an external system", what about "the external system will query F&O" or "the external system will receive notifications about invoices from F&O"?

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WillWU 22,361 on at

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Hi ant-tlc,

1, What do you mean by installing an app on a D365FO instance.

2, You can get data from D365FO by custom service or OData, but your requirements seem to require strong control over D365FO, and you can see if BYOD meets your requirements.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/analytics/export-entities-to-your-own-database

The BYOD feature lets administrators configure their own database, and then export one or more data entities that are available in the application into the database. (Currently, more than 1,700 data entities are available.) Specifically, this feature lets you complete these tasks:

Define one or more SQL databases that you can export entity data into.

Export either all the records (full push) or only the records that have changed or been deleted (incremental push).

Use the rich scheduling capabilities of the batch framework to enable periodic exports.

Access the entity database by using Transact-SQL (T-SQL), and even extend the database by adding more tables.

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ant-tlc 20 on at

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Thank you all for the replies they are very helpful. I'll try to answer all of the questions but apologies if I miss any.

"What do you mean by 'This should be an app which anyone can install on their D365 F&O instance'? Are you talking about Power App?"

By this I mean I would like to create a software package that a third-party client could install in their existing D365 instance with limited contact with us. For example, I would extend a form for an entity (say invoices) to have a button, on clicking that button it would POST some data via an oauth secured HTTP API.

"Seems that you would need to develop an ISV solution IN D365FO."

Yes this is how I started (I think), with an X++ project in VS, I was able to extend a form and that was great but I'm not sure how to store secrets and configuration in order to make the HTTP calls.

"So rather you could use one service account / credentials that you set up in the parameters of your application (and perhaps use Azure Key Vault for storing the password)."

This was what I wanted to do but then you kind of just move the problem, how do you store the secrets required to connect to key vault? For reference this would be a key vault instance owned by me and not the client.

""the external system will receive notifications about invoices from F&O"?"

This is something I had also considered from the start but I have the same problems.

I don't want the notifications system to be open to anyone, it should only be my app that could make notifications. So how would I store any secrets or config in such a way that the owner of the D365FO instance could not access them?

"but your requirements seem to require strong control over D365FO, and you can see if BYOD meets your requirements."

I agree it seems to require that we set up the D365FO instance and control it for a client but that isn't something we can do. Our clients will have their own Dynamics licences already. Would BYOD require us to have control over D365?

Thanks all again, really appreciate it.

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Martin Dráb 237,898 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Regarding connection to KeyVault, it's already supported by D365FO. Check out How to setup Azure Key Vault with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

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