Role
of PowerApps, Flow and Common Data Model in Dynamics 365 –how crm data will work
with Ax
Microsoft Flow
Automating tasks is at the core of any CRM or ERP platform, but
when the automation needs to happen between these applications usually
technologists turns to built-in connectors / adapters, custom development. All
of these solutions takes time, effort and most importantly significant
investment. This is where Flow comes to the rescue. Let’s take a scenario where
we need to send Sales Orders from CRM to AX. (Note: This is not a
representation of how Dynamics 365 will be deployed, rather it is a demonstration
of Flow functionality )
- Login to flow.microsoft.com (Sign up using
your Office 365 account).
- Create a new flow by clicking on the “Create from
blank” button
- Create the source flow, in this case our source is CRM.
and the flow step below
- Create a target flow, in this case our target in AX.
all of the data elements from CRM (the step above) are now available to be
passed to AX Sales Orders.
The Invoice Customer field is
passed from CRM Order to AX Sales Order Header.
- Create
a Sales Order in CRM as below
- As you save the order information within CRM within few
minutes you can see it process your Flow from CRM to AX, drill down on the
information button to see the flow of data.
- Let’s review this information now in Dynamics AX. As
you can see all of the information is passed through the flow to Dynamics
AX from CRM .
- Now let’s take one step further and pass this
information to the Common Data Model.
Common Data Model (CDM)
CDM provides standard business entities where customers can
build application on top of these entities. The standard entities expect your
data model to be somewhat closer to the out of the box CRM data model. In the
example we will create a new Entity called “ERP Sales Orders”
- Login to https://web.powerapps.com
(Sign up using your Office 365 accounts)
- Click on Connections click on “New Connections” and
create a “Common Data Model” connection.
- Once the connections are set, you should see the
Entities panel on the left navigation panel as below.
- Click on the “New Entity” button and create the entity
fields as follows.
- Once the new entity is created, now its time for us to
update the Flow that we built from CRM to AX to include CDM also. Add an
additional Step to the flow to write the record to CDM.
- The overall Flow should look like below and an Order
being created in CRM will be passed to AX and CDM.
- Now we are ready to create apps that leverage data
directly from any of these three data stores. In the example below let’s
build a simple app that picks up the data from both CRM and CDM.
PowerApps
- Download the PowerApps App fromhttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/powerapps/9nblggh5z8f3
- Login using your Office 365 credentials.
- If necessary create your Connections by clicking on the
left navigation to create connections to both CDM and CRM Online.
- I created 3 Screens for my app, the first one to show
an overview the second one to display CRM Opportunity data directly from
CRM Online and third screen from the CDM from the ERP Sales Orders entity
we created earlier.
·
Landing Page Properties
- They are Textboxes that have these controls. For
example the Count of Open Opportunities are coming from the syntax
- Property Text: Text(CountIf(Filter(Opportunities,
!IsBlank(name)), new_flowstatus=”Open”))
- Property OnSelect:
Navigate(Screen1,ScreenTransition.Fade)
Screen 1 Properties
- Its a Vertical Gallery with data elements coming from
the CRM Opportuntiy data connection.
Screen 2 Properties
- Its a Vertical Gallery with data elements coming from
the CDM ERP Sales Order entity data connection.
Save the App to the Cloud.
- If you login to your PowerApp from any of the major
application marketplaces you will see the application you published.
