Topic 5, Northwind Traders
Case study
Background
Northwind Traders uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to manage its sales process. To better understand its customers, Northwind Traders invests in a team of researchers who gather data from multiple sources. The company stores the data it collects in a Microsoft Azure SQL Database. The company plans to use the data to enrich account records and make the sales team more effective.
Environment
* The company has three Microsoft Power Platform environments with Dynamics 365 Sales installed. The environments are named development, test, and production.
* Each environment has an application user that can be used for integrations.
* The company must use solutions to perform all customization and configuration deployment.
Data
* Researchers are responsible for creating account records.
* Researchers have permissions on the Account table to create records, read all records, and update records they own.
* A synchronous plug-in runs when an account record is created and could reassign the record to a different user.
* Users must access data as themselves to enforce security and audit changes.
* A column named new_dataid is added to the Account table. The column uniquely identifies which data it should receive.
* Researchers have researched only the top 20 percent of account records.
Web API
* The company creates an Azure Function to run a RESTful .NET Web API.
o Data can be retrieved by placing a GET request to the URL
https://dataservice-tENVIRONMENTNAIvlEl.azurewebsites.net/enrich/IDATAID].
[ENVIRONMENTNAME] is the name of the Microsoft Power Platform environment that requests the data.
[DATAID] is the new.dataid column in the Account table.
o The Web API response will return a 200 response plus data if the Datald is found. Otherwise, a 404 response is returned.
* Developers plan to create a custom connector from the Web API to make it accessible from Microsoft Power Platform.
Custom connector
* The Web API definition used to create The custom connector must be generated based on a low-code technology.
* The URL used by the custom connector must incorporate the current environment name without hardcoding values.
* Errors generated by the custom connector must not cause downstream processes to fail.
* Text descriptions and field placeholder text that describe the use of the custom connector must appear for non-developers.
Process
* All account records must be updated with data from the Web API once automatically.
* Only account records that contain a Datald should be updated by the Web API.
* Researchers must create Power Automate flows to specify data analysis priority.
* The researchers require a process that repurposes a set of identical steps of parameterized Microsoft Dataverse queries from a Power Automate flow for use in other flows that have different parameters. The researchers want to avoid recreating the steps manually each time they create a flow to save time and avoid errors.
Issues
* A tester attempts to connect to the production instance of the Web API with a Datald that should return data.
The tester receives an error stating that the remote name could not be resolved.
* A missing component causes an error to occur when importing the solution that contains the Power Automate flow to update account records in a test environment.