Often my colleagues from the from software development and also me are asked by functional consultants what data entities should be used for specific requirements. When the consultants work on projects either on the data migration or on the design of integrations data entities are in place to be the starting point. Even it is not a probelm for developers to research within the development environment and also not for the consultants to find the information within the UI of Dynamics 365 F/SCM/C – but for both it is often time consuming to find the dependencies within the data model.
I also appreciate Microsoft data entities initiatve that is enhancing data entities documentation as well as transparancy within the Data Management Framework where you can view details of a specific data entity which is used within a data project using the entity attributes form.
Even we see some important information for a specific entity as field size, data type, mandatory, … we can not see the underlying tables that are affected. In this case try and error is the best practice for the consultant who have not access to a develepment environment when they need to populate a field that has dependencies to an other table/entity.
For this purpose I’ve created the Power BI based Entity research report to find dependencies between data entities and tables that are associated with a specific data entity. Based on the Powershell scripts for technical references that are provided at Github the Power BI report is interactive and searchable for entities, entity fields, tables, table fields and form references to get a faster insight about the data model.
Hope this can help some F&O consultants to get faster insights to the underlying data modell without ask a developer, applying try and error procedure with the DMF or extensive research on the web. If you like to be faster in data Entity research just put this published PowerBI report to your browser’s favourites.
This article was publsihed first on the Business imporvement blog an 12.02.2024.