Microsoft Dynamics

This page describes how to use Census with Microsoft Dynamics.

🏃‍♀️ Getting Started

This guide shows you how to use Census to connect your Microsoft Dynamics account to your data warehouse and create your first sync.

Prerequisites

Have your Census account ready. If you need one, create a Free Trial Census account now.
Have your Microsoft Dynamics account ready.
Have the proper credentials to access to your data source. See our docs for each supported data source for further information:

Step 1: Connect Microsoft Dynamics

For Production Dynamics instances, the user to authenticate Census needs to have "Service Writer" permissions. For the Default environment, the user must be an Admin. Read more about this here.

Log into Census and navigate to Destinations.
Click New Destination and select Microsoft Dynamics from the menu.
Follow the Microsoft Dynamics OAuth authentication flow, which will ask you to log in with your Microsoft Dynamics username and password.

Once complete, you'll see your new connection in the Destinations list. 👇

Step 2: Create your model

When defining models, you'll write SQL queries to select the data you want to see in Microsoft Dynamics. This can be as simple as selecting everything in a specific database table or as complex as creating new calculated values.

From inside your Census account, navigate to the Models page.
Click Add Model.
Enter a name for your model. You'll use this to select the model later.
Enter your SQL query. If you want to test the query, use the Preview button.
Click Save Model.

Step 3: Create your first sync

The sync will move data from your warehouse to Microsoft Dynamics. In this step, you'll define how that will work.

From inside your Census account, navigate to the Syncs page and click Add Sync.
Under What data do you want to sync?, choose your data warehouse as the Connection and your model as the Source.
Under Where do you want to sync data to?, choose Microsoft Dynamics as the Connection and the object (aka entity in Microsoft Dynamics) that you want to sync to (see Supported objects for more detail).
Under How should changes to the source be synced?, choose Update or Create (see Supported sync behaviors for options)
Under How are source and destination records matched?, select an Identifier for the model and for the Microsoft Dynamics object. Valid identifiers are single-columns keys for entities that you can set up in your Microsoft Dynamics instance (see Supported objects for more detail).
Under Which properties should be updated?, select which fields you would like to update.
Click Next. This will open the Confirm Details page where you can see a recap of your setup.
If you want to start a sync immediately, set the Run a sync now? checkbox.
Click Create Sync.

When configuring your sync, the page should look something like this: 👇

Step 5: Confirm the synced data is in Microsoft Dynamics

Once your sync is complete, it's time to check your data. Open Microsoft Dynamics and check that the entity that you sent data to has updated entries.

If everything went well, that's it! You've started syncing data from your warehouse to Microsoft Dynamics! 🥳️

And if anything went wrong, contact the Census support team to get some help.

🗄 Supported objects

Object Name

Supported?

Sync Keys

Entity name

✅

All single-column keys for the entity

All Microsoft Dynamic entities are supported as objects to sync to in Census. Here is some documentation on defining keys for entities in Microsoft Dynamics:

Define keys in Microsoft Dynamics
Define keys in Power Apps (Power Apps is the platform that Dynamics is built atop)

Lookups to other records

Lookups from one Dynamics Entity to another in the same 365 workspace can be configured, and this happens via the single-column keys for the entity as such:

When you have a null lookup, or a reference from which you want to disassociate a record, you need to sync over null.

For a string example of a column in Snowflake:

IFF(lookup_ref = '', NULL, lookup_ref) as lookup_ref