Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Page 79 – Nishant Rana's Weblog

How to – Unify (Map, Match and Merge) Entities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

In the earlier posts, we set up the trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, configured our data sources, one from Microsoft Dataverse and the other from a local excel file.

In this post, we will unify the contact in our different data sources and create the Customer Profile.

Navigate to Unify, and click on +Select entities to select our contact entities from the different data sources for creating the customer profile.

We have selected all the fields from Contacts – Local Excel Data Source.

We have selected Id, emailaddress1, first name, gender code, last name, mobile phone field selected from the contact entity of CRMDataSource.

Click on Apply.

For CRM Data Source – Contact, we can see the field auto mapped as we have Intelligent mapping on by default.

For the primary key, we have specified ID as the primary key.

For Contact – Local Excel Data Source, we can see one field not mapped.

As we cannot find the field in the existing list of fields, we can type in and that will create the new field.

For the primary key, we have selected email.

Save the mapping.

Now let us move to Match.

Here we will define the order first.

Here we have specified our CRM’s Contact as the primary data source and specified that all the records from it should be included.

Next, we need to define the rules for matching the records between the data sources.

We have selected the email field and set the precision as Basic – Medium.

The other option for Precision is Custom, where a value between 1 to 100 can be specified and we can also add additional rules.

For now, we’d only keep the email address rule with precision as a basic – medium.

Save the changes and Run the rule.

We can see the results after some time.

Time for Merge now. Clicking on Merge, we can see that it has auto-combined 2 fields first name and last name.

We have the option of Editing, renaming, separating, excluding, moving fields up and down.

We’d save and run the Merge.

For Run, we have 2 options –

Run Only Merge will affect the unified customer entity, whereas Run Merge and downstream processes will run enrichment, segments, measures process followed by changes in the customer profile.

Here we have selected Run Only Merge.

After around 5 minutes we can see the Merge successful.

Clicking on Customers asks us to configure the last step – Search & filter index.

Click on Add fields to define fields for searching and filtering.

We have selected below fields for indexing

Save and Run.

After a couple of minutes, we can see the indexing is successful.

Click on Back to customers to see our customer profile ready.

We will explore other features of Customer Insights in the coming posts.

Hope it helps..

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How to – Import Data from local data files to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Continuing our previous posts,

Set up Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Trial

Import Data from Dataverse

here we will import the contact records from a local excel file.

Navigate to Data >> Data Sources and click on Add data source

This time we will select the import method as Microsoft Power Query

Select Excel Workbook as the source.

Select Upload File (preview) option that lets us upload or drag a file directly from the local machine.

It will upload the file to the user’s OneDrive for Business account.

On dragging or uploading the file, we need to specify details for Connection Credentials i.e. create a new connection (if not already existing).

We have the different options for

Authentication kind – Anonymous or Organization Account.
Privacy Level – None, Private, Organizational, Public.

Let us change the Authentication kind to Organization account (followed by sign-in) and Privacy Level as Public and click on Next.

After successful sign-in, click on Next.

We can also see the file uploaded in the one drive.

Now within the Power Query editor, we have set the first row as a header.

Also, we need to remove the space from the column name (if any).

Save the query and click on Next.

For now, we have set the Refresh Settings as Refresh manually.

We can see the new data source added and being refreshed.

We have just 10 records in our Contact excel file.

It took around 2 hours for refresh to complete.

We can see the contact entity from the excel file added in Entities.

Click on it to see the Attributes.

And the Data

Now we have our contacts data ready from 2 different data sources ready, one from Dataverse and another from excel for the map, match, and merge, which we would do in the next post.

How to – Unify (Map, Match and Merge) Entities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Hope it helps..

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How to – Use SetAutoNumberSeed Action to reset/update the seed for the Autonumber attribute – DataVerse (Dynamics 365 / CRM)

Suppose we have the following Autonumber field created with

Seed value – 1000 and Format – {SEQNUM:4}

Now based on a certain requirement, we want to dynamically / programmatically update / reset the seed value.

For this, we can make use SetAutoNumberSeed Action

Below we can see the auto number set as 1007 on creating a new contact record.

Now to set it back to 1000 we can run the following code –

On executing the action, we can see the next contact record having autonumber field set as 1000.

Another example –

On updating the value to 888, and creating a new contact record

Sample code –

                OrganizationRequest customActionRequest =
                    new OrganizationRequest("SetAutoNumberSeed");

                // name of the entity
                customActionRequest["EntityName"] = "contact";

                // attribute's schema name
                customActionRequest["AttributeName"] = "cr59f_myautonumber";

                // the value we want to set
                customActionRequest["Value"] = Convert.ToInt64(888);

                OrganizationResponse customActionResponse = 
                    svc.Execute(customActionRequest);

Check other posts –

Few key points – Auto Number field in Dataverse (Dynamics 365 CE / CRM)

Set Auto Number field value conditionally in Dynamics 365 / Dataverse

https://powerobjects.com/tips-and-tricks/auto-number-d365-version-9/

Hope it helps..

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How to – Delete Data Source in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

While trying to delete a data source we might below error if we have already used it for Match and Merge for defining the customer profile.

“Couldn’t delete data source. To process, remove its entities from: Match, Merge.”

Click on Enrichment

Navigate to Match.

Here also we cannot remove the entities in Unify as we have already used them in Merge.

So let us navigate to Merge.

Select all the fields from the DataSource (CRMDataSource in our case) which we want to delete, and click on Exclude.

Save the changes.

Now navigate back to Match and we will get the option to remove the CRMDataSource.

However, we will still not see the option to save the change as we just have 2 entities there.

Here we can add a different data source’s entity, e.g. we added the contact from our test data source.

And saved the changes.

Now as the last step we need to remove the entity from the Map also.

Click on Edit fields and unselect the entity, followed by Apply.

Navigating back to Data Sources, we were able to delete the Data Source successfully now.

So in short, if we need to delete a data source, which we have configured for customer profile, we need to first remove its references from Merge, Match and than Map.

Hope it helps..

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