Dataverse Potential Integration with Dyanmics Data

[Chris1969]

We are developing a software application for customers, some of whom have Dynamics, and others do not.

Our application has a business requirement to relate information to accounts and contacts (e.g., account "ABC" has real estate leases in Miami and Orlando, while account "XYZ" has real estate leases in San Francisco and Los Angeles).

Dataverse's Virtual Entities seem to be a great fit for referencing existing account data from Dynamics (and avoiding storing an application-specific extra copy of such data), but as mentioned above, only some customers who will use our application have Dynamics.  For those customers who do not have Dynamics, we need to maintain a separate table of account data. 

How have others navigated this type of scenario?  Can an application be configured to sometimes use a virtual entity but other times a standalone table?

[ChrisPiasecki · Accepted solution]

Hi @Chris1969,

First off, Its a good idea to segment your solution so that the core only depends on the Dataverse / common data model, and have another solution for the components that take a dependency on Dynamics components so that you have that flexibility in what to deploy to your customers.

Secondly, the customer can deploy your solution into their existing environment to leverage Account data without requiring a Virtual entity. If they don't want to deploy it into the same environment that the Dynamics data lives, then virtual entities is a decent alternative over syncing master data down to other environments. 

If you want to support the virtual entity route, then you can either have multiple apps where one includes the virtual Account entity where the other includes the out of box Account entity and decide which one to ship out to the customer. Or you package both in the App and let your customer configure which one they want to show in the app based on their setup.

Note that virtual entities are organization owned and can't natively be be secured at the row level (you'd need to implement that security yourself).

Instead of trying to hack it you'd be better off just supporting both and choose which one is appropriate for the customer.

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