Using PowerApps to implement data integration between Dynamics 365 FO and CE

By Kenard Agbanlog, Senior Technical Consultant, Arbela Technologies

We’ve recently been using Microsoft PowerApps for data in data integration between Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (FO). Here, we present an overview of what the capabilities are and how this is done from start to finish.

Capabilities and features

Data integration in PowerApps provides several features for a CE <>FO data integration. Some notable features are:

• Allowing customization of mapping and manipulation of data. Advanced query provides PowerBI capabilities for filtering rows, joining tables, adding columns and more
• Leveraging the data management framework of FO. This makes it easier for FO users to review and troubleshoot data import/export with FO
• Built in scheduling capabilities
• Execution histories for troubleshooting
• Facilitating connections to multiple environments, making separation between development test and production environments easier to manag

Setting up a data integration

Connection setup is done through the main PowerApps menu under Data > Connections. Although we use a CE <> FO integration as an example, there are several other data sources can be used for integrations- some are shown below.

Once the connections to the two data sources (CE and FO) are set up, Data integrations can be set up in the PowerApps admin center. Several example projects are available to use as templates here, as shown below. Custom projects may also be converted into templates for easy checkpointing and reuse. The next steps are to select the data connections to integrate between and the desired legal entities, if relevant.

On the page that follows after creating our project (below), we can customize our data integration.

Adding a task will allow us to map table in CE to a data entity in FO. Tasks will be executed in sequence and can be reordered. Clicking on a task’s map arrow will allow modification of source and target mapping. We can also select Scheduling on this page to set the recurrence and frequency that this project will run. The Execution history will allow us to check the status and troubleshoot warnings or errors that we may encounter. Enabling Advanced query will allow us to use Power BI commands to further refine the data we work with, and provides capabilities such as table joining, adding new columns, and filtering rows. A screenshot of the Advanced query customization is shown below (with data hidden for privacy reasons).

Once we are happy with our set up, we can begin running the data integration as a one-off or scheduling it to run periodically.

Need some assistance? Contact us and we'll be happy to help.

Resources and further reading

Link to the PowerApps website: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

Microsoft documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/administrator/data-integrator