Common Data Model and Dynamics NAV

[IanJuv]

I'm looking to find confirmation if I'm looking at this the right way. I've gone through the guided learning and a fair amount of posts over the Internet, but I'm entirely new to Powerapps and Flows, so forgive me if I'm missing something. 

I'm looking to create a demo app, simply for the purpose of familiarizing myself with PowerApps.

What I want to do is create a PowerApp that I could use to track the time I spent on an assignment and store it into the CDM. The exact lay-out of the app doesn't matter, but the premise is that I want to keep track of time I spent for a customer, but specifically gets all customer records from the customer page in NAV. I've published a webservice to do that, which works. 

Because I'm really working with two data sources (NAV's webservice for customers and a place to store time entries), I was thinking to use a flow to populate/map the customer data from NAV, into the account entity for CDM. What I've currently done:

- Retrieve customers from an NAV instance, hosted on Azure by a cloudpartner. I can create a connection a run a simple sample app on that data that works just fine.

- Create a Common Data Model, that stores very simple information (code and name will do) on those customers, in the account entity

- Create a PowerApp that allows me to populate a custom entity in the CDM called "Time entry". I'm thinking about a start/stop button and a dropdown list showing the customer names to register time on. OR a manual entry screen, if my previous solution is a bit too ambitious for me at this stage 🙂

From my understanding, I can't do a one-off "get all records from the NAV database and store them in CDM", I can only use the create/update trigger. So I'd have to do a one-off import and then use the flow to trigger new additions/modifications to the records. However, this flow never fires. It just sits there, despite one or more creates over the course of an hour.

My questions:
- Is that normal? I simply used a blank Flow template, used the NAV connector, used the CDM connector and the flow creates just fine, it just doesn't seem to do anything. Not a single run in the history for 1+ hrs.

- Is my premise correct? I can use the CDM to gather data from several sources, map them to become "standardized" with CDM (or use custom entities)?

If not, what would the ideal approach be?

Do note, I'm just wondering on anyone's viewpoint or opinion, I'll try and figure out the rest myself 🙂

Thx!

[IanJuv]

Addendum:

I've been able to fire off the triggers from NAV, by going to the "When a record is created in NAV" trigger step in my flow, by clicking the ellipsis in of that step, picking settings and turning OFF "split on". There's a delay of about a minute or two max, but this seems to work better.

The events are triggered but the problem in NAV is that a record is stored immediately after even clicking "new". There's no save button, so the record does get created in my CDM, but with no data, just the primary key (which makes sense, that's all Flow has upon "record creation").

So I'm guessing I need to add a second flow to update my records?  I've just tried that, but the update flow fails:

"Resource not found". I'll tinker away on that.

Has anyone ever succesfully integrated NAV data in a CDM app?

[IanJuv]

There has to be someone else out there, trying to make D365 and/or NAV work with the CDM, right?

[IanJuv]

Anyone?

I just want to retrieven customers from a NAV database. Considering both are int he Dynamics family, this can't that hard, right?

[Anonymous]

Did you happen to ever get anywhere with this? I'm trying to do the same thing, though from a slightly different angle. I'm having problems because of fields like Account ID that I can't map to a GUID in NAV because it doesn't have GUIDs - or at least ours doesn't...