Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is a great tool to create surveys. It also comes with a set of integration templates for other Dynamics 365 products like Customer Service and Field Service. The service order template is using a flow in Power Automate to send a satisfaction survey to the primary contact after a work order in Dynamics 365 Field Service has been completed. This video shows how to setup the template and what it looks like in practice:
Entities in Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain are not only good to access data. Entities can also be used to execute X++ business logic from 3rd party applications like Power Automate.
For example a table contains shipping carrier records. A Carrier has a Name and Description. The name is the primary key. The combination of Name and DataAreaId makes a record unique at the database.
Carrier Table
There is also an entity to access the data.
Carrier Table Entity
An Action is a piece of X++ logic exposed via entity. This example sets the Carrier as default value for a customer:
public class DMOCarrierTableEntity extends common
{
/// Set as default
/// Customer Account
[SysODataActionAttribute('SetDefault', true)]
public void approve(CustAccount _custAccount)
{
ttsbegin;
CustTable custTable = CustTable::find(_custAccount,true);
custTable.DMOPreferredCarrier = this.Name;
custTable.update();
ttscommit;
}
Power Automate (aka. Flow) is a great solution for process automation. It is very useful to realize cross-application processes. Power Automate features a wide variety of tasks and connectors. It also comes with a connector for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management. It can be used to trigger a flow, interact with data and execute business logic in D365 FO from within a flow. You can find all videos on my YouTube Channel.
Part 1: Trigger a Flow with Business Events
Business Events in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management are use to interact with other systems. For example you can send message to Azure Event Hub but also to Power Automate. There are some specific events but you can also use change-based alerts in Dynamics. This video shows how to trigger a flow using such a business event.
Business Events can trigger Power Automate flows
Part 2: Interact with data in Dynamics 365 Finance and SCM
The Connector for Dynamics 365 FO uses entities to interact with data in the ERP system. You can create new records, read, update and delete records. Here is an example where Power Automate receives data from Forms Pro and create a new customer in Dynamics 365 FO.
Create new records in Dynamics 365 FO from Flow
Part 3: Execute Business Logic in Dynamics 365 Finance and SCM
The Dynamics 365 FO Connector in Power Automate supports to execute business logic by calling actions on entities. Here is a video how to approve a Bill of Materials in Teams and execute the Approval logic via Flow.
The Dynamics 365 connector in Power Automate provides the basic operations to interact with your Dynamics 365 FO instance. You can create new records via flow (e.g. a new Customer), read, update and delete records (e.g. Sales Order Lines) and retrieve the list of available entities.
Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Connector in Power Automate
The connector uses OData to interact with the entities in Dynamics 365 FO. Therefore, it also supports OData syntax for filter expressions. If you want to filter on a boolean Extended Datatype like NoYes and try to use “Yes” or “1” or true it will not work. Dynamics 365 has its own Datatype that comes from the entity definition Microsoft.Dynamics.DataEntities.NoYes .
One Time Customer in Dynamics 365 Finance
For example, if you want to get all One-Time Customers from Dynamics 365 FO, use the Dynamics 365 connector and choose the action “List items in present Table”. Use the Customers entity. To filter on a NoYes field like One-Time Customer you have to use the following syntax:
Power Automate (aka. Microsoft Flow) is a great cloud-based tool to automate all possible tasks. There is a Ethereum connector (Beta) that can be used to deploy a Smart Contract to an Ethereum Blockchain network and execute functions.
Ethereum Network
You need to connect to an Ethereum network. There is a fully managed Blockchain Service in Azure. I’m running my private network with Proof-of-Authority. At the Azure management portal, go to the transaction node to get the required information to connect.
Blockchain-as-a-Service in Azure
Smart Contract
I’m using Visual Studio Code with the Ethereum Blockchain Development SDK to implement a Smart Contract in Solidity. You can find the link to the SDK at the Azure Blockchain Service portal.
VS Code with Azure Blockchain SDK
The SDK requires a lot of other software products to download and install. I found that the solidity compiler installed was newer than expected. As result the demo smart contract you get from the SDK did not compile. The simplest solution was to change the pragma of the contract
pragma solidity >= 0.5.16 <= 0.7.0;
ABI and Bytecode
In order to automate the deployment of a Smart Contract via Power Automate you need to provide the ABI and Bytecode. Both can be found in VS Code, at the build directory in the context menu.
Copy ABI and Bytecode directly from VS Code
Power Automate
You can directly provide the ABI and Bytecode in the Deploy Smart Contract action. However, I decided to place both in an Azure Table Storage and fetch it from there. To do so, I create a table with a column for the Bytecode, a column for the ABI and a name.
The first step in my flow is to connect to the Azure Storage account and get the smart contract I need. The result from the storage is a JSON string which is parsed so the ABI and Bytecode is available for the next steps
Fetch the smart contract binaries from the storage account
Next the Deploy Smart Contract action is used to deploy the contract. There you need to provide the connection to your Ethereum network. In my example there are two parameters for the constructor and for testing purpose these values are hardcoded. In real life you would provide values from the calling sources. The third parameter for the connector action requires the Bytecode which is taken from the storage account. The result from the deployment is the smart contracts address which is stored in a flow variable.
Deploy a smart contract
Interacting with the smart contract
After the Smart Contract has been deployed to the Ethereum Blockchain Network, use the Execute Smart Contract Function action in the flow. For each step you have to provide the address, the ABI, the name of function and the parameter as JSON string. A function without parameters has to be called with {} because the parameter property is mandatory.
Execute a Smart Contract function via Power Automate / Flow
Here is an example for a function with some parameters. These parameters have to be provided as JSON string in Flow.
function SetupMachine(int sawLength,
int waterTemp,
int rpm,
int speed) public
{
if (State != StateType.Assigned)
{
revert('Assign to a machine first');
}
SawLengthMM = sawLength;
WaterTempDgrC = waterTemp;
ExtruderRPM = rpm;
ExtruderSpeed = speed;
State = StateType.Setup;
Worker = msg.sender;
}
UI Flows are new features from power platform april 2020 wave, and allow you to integrate local installed applications and web sites. I’ve made a video with UI Flow for web sites. In this demo I’ve create a flow that reads the Bitcoin / Euro rate from a web sites and sends it per Email.
ErpCoder 