One of the capabilities that make the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain & Commerce applications so successful is their ability to integrate smoothly and performantly with 3rd Party systems. The 'heart' of this capability has been a comprehensive pre-built library of data entities shipped with the application, matched with the ability for end user organisations & Microsoft Partners to either extend those standard entities or make their own.
When introducing new organisation to D365 and the topic of integrations comes up we find most functional consultants will point a customer to these data entities for importing/exporting data as part of data loading/migration activities but often they don't explain the relationship between the Data Entities and API's - they are not the same thing but work together.
What is a Data Entity in D365?
A data entity is a way to encapsulate the underlying physical schema of multiple tables into a single de-normalized view that can be used for various scenarios, such as import/export, integration, and reporting.
There are 5 different types of data entity in D365 that are classed based on the type of data they are interacting with:
Parameter
Reference - e.g. units, dimensions, and tax codes.
Master - e.g. customers, vendors, and projects.
Document - e.g. sales orders, purchase orders, open balances, and journals.
Transaction - e.g. pending invoices.
What is an API in the context of D365?
An API is an interface that allows external applications and systems to interact with the data entities by using the OData protocol, which is a standard for RESTful APIs. Inside D365 Finance, Supply Chain or Commerce you can use the Data management framework’s package API or the recurring integrations API to import or export data packages that contain data entities.
The best definition we have seen of the relationship between a Data Entity in D365 and an API is as below:
The relationship between a data entity and an API is that the data entity provides the data model and the business logic, while the API provides the communication channel and the query options.
How do I find the list of Data Entities available to me?
We have found that its not wise to rely on lists taken from website blogs, the best way to find the list of data entities available in your specific version of Dynamics 365 is to look directly in the application itself as below:
Our example below is taken from an environment running this version: 10.0.0.37 / Update61
From the menu on the left hand side of the D365 User Interface choose the 'Data Management' Workspace
Then press the 'Data entities' tile as per our example below:
You will then see a long list of all the data entities available in your particular application version & environment. You can use the filter option to search for the entities you might be interested in.
Tip: Its common for Microsoft Partners and End Users to add some form of prefix to a data entity name they have created, so try and find out what those might be for your organisations environment.