Data management - Data entities
·
Data entity is a conceptual abstraction and
encapsulation of one of more underlying tables.
·
Data entity represents a common data concept or
functionality, for example, Customers or Vendors.
·
Data entities are intended to be easily
understood by users familiar with business concepts. After data entities are
created, you can reuse them through the Excel Add-in, use them to define
import/export packages, or use them for integrations
A data entity represents a meaningful set of data.
For instance, a data entity could be created for a customer that contains
information from various database tables that define what a customer is, e.g., name, payment information, addresses, etc. A data
entity organizes all this data in a way that’s convenient to handle and allows
users to work with the entity itself to import or export data, rather than
having to import or export individual tables.
Let’s create a data entity to handle exporting and
importing item serial numbers using single database InventSerial.
· Create a D365 project in Visual Studio named DataEntityExample. To create a
new entity, right-click the project and then click Add > New
item. The Add
New Item dialogue box opens.
· Select Data Entity, and
then set the Name property
to ItemSerialNumber. Then click
the Add button.
In the Data
Entity Wizard, all
of the properties will be defaulted except Primary
datasource. Select InventSerialtable
as the primary datasource to export/import the item serial numbers. Click
the Next button.
Add fields to the new entity from the data
source InventSerial as shown in the
following screenshot. Click the Convert
labels to field names checkbox to generate names from the existing
labels.
Click Finish. The
newly created data entity and staging table are added to the project.
In Solution Explorer, right-click on the ItemSerialNumber data entity
node and then click Open. Set
the Labelproperty to Item Serial Numbers. This is
the name that will get displayed in the data entity list.
To make the entity available in data management,
the property Data Management
Enabled should be set to Yesand
the property Data Management
Staging Table should be ItemSerialNumberStaging.
To make the entity available in an Odata scenario,
the Public Collection Name and Public Entity Name will
get defaulted, and the property Is
Public should be set to Yes.
Now open the ItemSerialNumberStaging table
in the designer. Staging tables are used in import/export scenarios to
temporarily store the data being exported and imported. In many cases, staging
tables are mapped 1:1 to an entity.
Note that the first four fields (DefinitionGroup,
ExecutionId, IsSelected and TransferStatus) are the standard fields of a data
entity staging table. The table also contains the data fields we selected while
creating the data entity. Note that the data entity relations will be created
automatically.
In Solution Explorer, right-click the project, and
then click Properties. Set Synchronize database on build property
to True.
Note: Entities are created as views in Microsoft SQL Server, and
staging tables also are added. Therefore, we must sync a database when we build
entities.
