CMDB with Common Data Services

[NicolasBu]

Good day !

I am pretty new to Common Data Services, and after spending hours reading forums, documentation and tweaking, I am reaching out for some help of the community. My business case is in principle pretty simple, but it seems more complicated when it comes to actually set it up within CDS. I have embedded a rather basic model of the DB I am trying to create.

The requirements are the following:

- Companies is the parent entity that relates with child entities (assets) as a 1:N relationship.

- the DB has to be able to handle bulk import as well as manual input from a form for instance.

- basic duplicate rules are to be implemented to make sure the data remains unique and consistent.

This issues I am currently facing are the following:

- Dataflows do not handle lookup fields, or I did not find how to.

- Get data from Excel handles lookup fields, but it is a manual and singular operation that does not provide any ETL ability nor planning such as the ones offered by Dataflows and Power Query.

- The only way to link data between entities in bulk I found is through the GUID, which is pretty inconvenient as I have to manipulate the import CSV/Excel files prior to loading to add the GUID using a vlookup from the Companies entity export.

- I do not fully understand how the duplicate rules vs duplicate jobs work. I have set a rule in the solution designer to check duplicates on a field that contains only unique values, set the settings on data import active, but duplicates are loaded anyway. Same, when I set up a job, it does not handle the duplicates (deactivate or delete) but only offers a way to highlight them to be handled manually, which is in this case a no brainer considering the amount of records.

- I do not understand how Keys works in CDS and what they are used for in this case.

Thanks for the insights, hopefully it is clear 😀

[Drrickryp · Accepted solution]

Hi @NicolasBu 

I have found that the best way to import data into related entities is to use the dynamics365 Import wizard.  Check this article and see if it helps.  https://crmbook.powerobjects.com/basics/data-management-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm/importing-data-in-... 

[NicolasBu]

Hi @Drrickryp ,

Thank you for that, it is very well hidden in the interface of PowerApps and I did not find until now any information about this wizard. It seems to be solving the issue of related entities by providing more flexibility (you can link data using various fields and the look up seems to be working even without GUID). I need to see about recurrent import and data refreshing.

I will play around a bit to see how far I can go with that but it looks cool otherwise!

Cheers

Nicolas

[Pramila]

Hi,

Did you find a way to import data without the GUID Key. Its difficult to get those keys before we get load.

Anyway you found to remove the duplicate by setting the fields?

@NicolasBu @Drrickryp 

Thanks,

Pramila