Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Page 69 – Nishant Rana's Weblog

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..

Advertisements

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..

Advertisements

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..

Advertisements

How to – Delete Audit data by entity / table, date, user access, and specify retention duration – updates in Dataverse (Dynamics 365 / CRM)

Recently we saw a new update in our sandbox environments with regards to Audits.

We can see a new section Auditing added.

Click on Delete logs allows us to –

Delete logs by Table

We can select the tables there.

Delete only access logs data.

Delete logs up to the selected date.

And now we can also manage or specify the retention duration for the audit log.

These are very useful updates to the Audit feature in the platform which more or less have been similar since CRM 3.0 days.

Check other posts on Audit –

https://nishantrana.me/2021/08/31/audit-entity-table-few-key-points-dynamics-365-power-apps/

https://nishantrana.me/2021/05/17/how-to-export-the-audit-history-values-from-dynamics-365/

https://nishantrana.me/2018/10/08/using-kingswaysofts-cds-crm-source-component-to-get-audit-information-in-dynamics-365-ce-ssis/

How to – Use RetrieveAttributeChangeHistoryRequest to get audit data for an attribute (Dataverse/ Dynamics 365/ CRM) – Nishant Rana’s Weblog

Hope it helps..

Advertisements

Couldn’t add resource. Microsoft Dataverse is in use error in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

We might get the below error while trying to add Microsoft Dataverse Data source in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

“Coundn’t add resource. Microsoft Dataverse is in use”

As the error message indicates, this is because we have an already existing data source connected to that same organization.

We can edit the Data Source and can add entities to the same connection.

also delete the data source, if its entities are not used in Match and Merge

else we will get the below error message.

“To proceed, remove its entities from: Match, Merge”

In this case we will have to remove the entities from any Merge and Match configuration first.

Hope it helps..

Advertisements

How to – Import Data from Dataverse / CRM to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

In the last post, we had set up the trial version of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

https://nishantrana.me/2022/01/26/how-to-set-up-dynamics-365-customer-insights-trial/

Currently, our trial instance has no data.

We can ingest data into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights from Microsoft Dataverse either using Microsoft Power Query (Dataverse Connector)

or Microsoft Dataverse import method.

The Microsoft Dataverse import method doesn’t copy the data into the Customer Insights / Audience Insights Data Lake, however, it doesn’t allow for Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) as in the case of Microsoft Power Query data source.

Select Audience Insights >> Data >> Data Sources >> Choose your import method – Microsoft Dataverse

Provide a name to the data source and click on Next.

Enter the Server address, Sign in, and click on Next.

Select the Entity, here we have selected the contact entity for now.

We can see the data source is being refreshed.

We have the option of stopping the refresh.

We are having 100 records in our contact entity inside CRM.

It took around 5 hours for the refresh to complete successfully.

We have the option of Edit, Refresh and Delete on the Data Source after the successful refresh.

We can see the contact entity available within Data >> Entities section

Clicking on contact, we can see the Attributes used and Data in it as well as the option to download the data.

The download will be downloading the first 100K records.

Now when it comes to creating a unified customer profile through (MMM) i.e. mapping, matching, and merging, it requires a minimum of 2 entities to be there, to generate the Customer Profile.

In the next post, we will import some sample contact data from a local excel file and use it for further configuring our customer profile.