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Virtual Entities Data Source Binding

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Good Day Folks

I wonder if anyone who uses Virtual Entity in their customisation experiencing any changes after updating/apply patch (the one that is used on where I customise is updated up to September 2020 patch). So, basically on the virtual entity we need to select the data source

Dev Envi (VE bound to Data Source)

However, when the solution is imported to higher envi, let's say for testing environment, the virtual entities do not seem to be bound based on what we have on the lower envi (dev unmanaged solution).

SIT (Testing) Envi, VE does not seem to be bound on its data source as it is on dev unmanaged solution.

At first, we found that this is not a major issue, since eventhough it seems that there is no data source bound to the virtual entity, everything seems fine as after checking through the solution xml (unmanaged), there is datasource bound to the virtual entity.

However, a few of the virtual entities seem to still not bound to the data source eventhough on the unmanaged solution .xml file it seems to be bound and this causes confusion on which is actually bound or not as we cannot literally check through solution customisation UI as usual.

What makes it even more confusing is that, eventhough some of the VEs seem to be able to fetch data as expected, but when checking on db, the VE data source is actually not setup at all (see the second tabular result for SIT environment, the first tabular result is DEV environment)

This issue had not existed for at least in August 2020 patch (cumulative updates). Any clue on what might be missing when configuring the VE? Many thanks in advance and have a nice one.

Regards

Jonas

CRM Build: D365 v9.0.20 (on-premise)

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Madalina Toma on at

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Hello Jonas_Bunawan,

Thank you for the post.

There are few bits and pieces to be taken into consideration for this issue, please find a couple of ideas below:

- when you create virtual entities, they will be stored as records and as metadata

- the records part will not be part of the export, or better explained, a solution does not have records inside it, just metadata

- on the other hand, the solution itself should have the virtual entity, the data provider and the data source

Based on your screenshot you have the entity, but do you have the data source and the data provider exported in the customizations.xml?

As we introduced those later, they don't have a correspondent in the dependencies section of the solution file, therefore the solution import won't fail due to dependencies.

Could you please help us understand if the data source is part of the customization.xml? If it is not, please include it and re-import your solution, if it is there, I would like to know in order to try to test this in that version of on premises.

Thank you,

Madalina Toma

Microsoft D365 CE Support

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Toma

Thanks for your responses, kindly find the following for my responses upon your doubt:

"- on the other hand, the solution itself should have the virtual entity, the data provider and the data source

Based on your screenshot you have the entity, but do you have the data source and the data provider exported in the customizations.xml?"

The Data Provider & Data Sources were imported alongside the VEs themselves under one solution (they are on same customization.xml). I made sure of that.

* As you might have noticed all of the needed components are on the same customisation.xml with relevant guid.

"- when you create virtual entities, they will be stored as records and as metadata

- the records part will not be part of the export, or better explained, a solution does not have records inside it, just metadata"

Ok, I take that into account. However, my screenshot was showing the query of VEs that have been bound to data source and provider but the result was there was none, despite of the fact that the VEs are actually bound from the solution source environment (just like what is shown on the development environment). My concern is that why the data source and provider are empty despite of the fact that they are actually bound (when checking, apparently we could access the data). And the VEs are actually created on the imported managed environment, but with irrelevant data source & provider as expected (empty), which means that there are records created post solutions import:

DEV (unmanaged, solutions source)

SIT (Managed, targeted environment)

I was just wondering if there is anything on the patch update that affects this.

Do we have to manually bind the VEs again one by one on higher environment post solutions import? if so, it was not like this before. Thanks.

Regards,

Jonas

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Madalina Toma on at

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Hi Jonas,

I will go ahead and deploy a set of 9.0 machines in order to test, but it will take me some time.

Thank you!

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Hi Madalina

No worries at all, thanks to you. Hope things are well nevertheless, though

Regards,

Jonas

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Madalina Toma on at

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Hi Jonas,

I hope my answer does not come too late.

I had exported from a vanilla organization a new data source, data provider and custom virtual entity, initially I had not been able to associate the entity with the data provider due to missing setup in Settings->Administration->Virtual Data Provider, but after that parameter has been set, I don't have any problem with it.

I would kindly ask you to raise a ticket to us in order to investigate this issue further, in case the issue is still reproducible because most probably we will need to take some SQL logs and compare them with the solution import process, on the other hand, as something to try, if you also have this build in dev, try to create a new solution with the data source, data provider, the plugin associated with it and the virtual entity and try to import on top in order to see if the issue is still reproducible.

And here is how it looks like in the organization where it has been exported from:

My build is:

Thank you,

Madalina

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Hi Madalina

There was no issue when exporting and importing the solutions on our end actually. However the result on the targeted environment was not like expected as in the data source and the Virtual Entity itself is not bound as how it is on source environment.

Fortunately, this turns out to be a not major showstopper issue, but more like a buggy modification that we are not aware of. Thanks for checking up on this issue, though.

Regards,

Jonas

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