18
Last spring we created a flow map that connected Business Central with dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (formerly known as CRM). For the remaining part of this post, CE will refer to D365 for Customer Engagement and BC will rever to Dynamics Business Central.

Our solution was elegant and simple. When an account was created in CE it would trigger a flow which would create a customer in BC using the BC customer card. If you are not familiar with Nav/BC/Financials (all the same product but not) you can expose the Customer Card with the "web services" section of the application.

During this time the BC connector was duplicated in Flow. One version consumed these exposed web services from within the configuration on BC and one did not. Even when BC was "cloud" the web services would still populate on one of the two connectors.

This connector was used as our client had a complex data structure involving 3 entities in CE that needed to all map to the single Customer Card in BC

Recently the connector was removed! exporting their flow to a new tenant resulted in a connection that could never be found. As you create the now single BC connection it was no longer accessible from the import screen. Looking deeper into the json of the import file I discovered that the connector was called "shared_dynamicsfinancials"

I have spent the last week trying every possible way to integrate the complex structure from CE to BC and replace our simple maps (which still work great on tenants that existed before the "shared_dynamicsfinancials" connector was suddenly removed from flow

Eventually, hours ago I found this page which still has the old connector
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shared_dynamicsfinancials/microsoft-dynamics-365-business-central/
If you click documentation it will send you to a 404... HOWEVER, there is a template for a stock notification! logging into the new client and adding this provisioned our connection and we were able to access the customer_card holy grail of BC customer creation

If you are reading this and have any power, contacts, anyone you know who is connected to the flow team please have them restore this critical functionality. The ability to expose entities from BC (referred to as tables sometimes) and have them available in flow is a great and incredibly useful. The current business central connector does not consume exposed web services from the app and offers no way to update a customer or extend and integrate the platform.

If you ran into this problem recently when the connector disappeared I hope this helps you.

You can view images of this feature that already exists and is just hidden/inaccessible here https://community.dynamics.com/business/f/758/p/299961/864942#864942
Category: General
STATUS DETAILS
Declined
Ideas Administrator

Unfortunately we don't have any plans to bring back the old connectors this idea mentions.
We would like to instead suggest you use the Customer entity from the set of APIs we expose through the new connector.  
Partner can also build a custom connector to support more advanced scenarios as using custom entities is currently not supported (but in our backlog already).

Kind regards,
Blazej Kotelko
PM, Microsoft


Comments

J

Agree! We have created a flow based on the old connector which cannot be imported into a different environment. The old connector isn't available in the other environment.

We have used the possibilty to "get items" from self-published webservices. This isn't possible anymore in the new connector.

Category: General

J

Agreed. The old connector was EXTREMELY useful.

Category: General