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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/dynamics365-odata-infragistics-reveal.rst

⇱ Analyze Dynamics 365 Data in Infragistics Reveal

Analyze Dynamics 365 Data in Infragistics Reveal

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Use the CData API Server to create an OData API on top of Dynamics 365 data and visualize live Dynamics 365 data in Infragistics Reveal.

Reveal is a data visualization solution provided by Infragistics and can be paired with the CData API Server to build dynamic dashboards from live Dynamics 365 data. The CData API Server generates an OData API for Dynamics 365, which is natively consumable in Reveal. In this article, we walk through connecting to Dynamics 365 in API Server and connecting to the API Server from Infragistics Reveal to create a simple dashboard.

About Dynamics 365 Data Integration

CData simplifies access and integration of live Microsoft Dynamics 365 data. Our customers leverage CData connectivity to:

  • Read and write data in the full Dynamics 365 ecosystem: Sales, Customer Service, Finance & Operations, Marketing, and more.
  • Extend the native features of Dynamics CRM with customizable caching and intelligent query aggregation and separation.
  • Authenticate securely with Dynamics 365 in a variety of ways, including Azure Active Directory, Azure Managed Service Identity credentials, and Azure Service Principal using either a client secret or a certificate.
  • Use SQL stored procedures to manage their Dynamics 365 entities - listing, creating, and removing associations between entities.

CData customers use our Dynamics 365 connectivity solutions for a variety of reasons, whether they're looking to replicate their data into a data warehouse (alongside other data sources) or analyze live Dynamics 365 data from their preferred data tools inside the Microsoft ecosystem (Power BI, Excel, etc.) or with external tools (Tableau, Looker, etc.).


Getting Started


Connect to Dynamics 365 from API Server

CData API Server uses a straightforward, point-and-click interface to connect to data sources and generate APIs.

  1. Open API Server and click Settings -> Connection -> Add Connection 👁 Adding a connection
  2. Select "Dynamics 365" 👁 Selecting a Connector (Salesforce is shown).
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Dynamics 365.

    Edition and OrganizationUrl are required connection properties. The Dynamics 365 connector supports connecting to the following editions: CustomerService, FieldService, FinOpsOnline, FinOpsOnPremise, HumanResources, Marketing, ProjectOperations and Sales.

    For Dynamics 365 Business Central, use the separate Dynamics 365 Business Central driver.

    OrganizationUrl is the URL to your Dynamics 365 organization. For instance, https://orgcb42e1d0.crm.dynamics.com

    👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown).

Add Dynamics 365 Resource Definitions in API Server

After connecting to Dynamics 365, create Resources, which represent API endpoints for Dynamics 365 data.

  1. Click Settings -> Resources -> Add Resource 👁 Adding a new resource
  2. Select the Dynamics 365 connection 👁 Selecting a connection (Salesforce is shown)
  3. Select the table you wish to retrieve and click Next 👁 Selecting a Table (Salesforce is shown)
  4. (Optional) Edit the resource to select specific fields and more
  5. Save the settings

Add an API Server User

Create a User to connect to Dynamics 365 from Reveal through API Server.

  1. Click Settings -> Users
  2. Click Add
  3. Configure a User with access to the Dynamics 365 Connection and Resource(s) 👁 Creating a new user
👁 API Server users

(Optional) Configure Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

When accessing and connecting to multiple different domains from an application such as Ajax, there is a possibility of violating the limitations of cross-site scripting. In that case, configure the CORS settings in Settings -> Server.

  • Enable cross-origin resource sharing (CORS): ON
  • Allow all domains without '*': ON
  • Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, PUT, POST, OPTIONS
  • Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Authorization

Save the changes to the settings.

👁 Configuring CORS settings

Create a Dashboard in Reveal

With the API Server configured, we can visualize Dynamics 365 data in Reveal.

  1. Log into Reveal and click Dashboards -> New 👁 Adding a new dashboard
  2. Click Data Source -> OData Feed 👁 Adding a new OData data source
  3. Specify the API Server API endpoint URL, for example: https://serverurl/api.rsc 👁 Configuring the OData URL
  4. Select Generic Credentials and specify the API Server username and authentication token 👁 Configuring the credentials
  5. Select the entity you wish to visualize 👁 Selecting an entity to visualize (Salesforce is shown.)
  6. Select fields and choose a chart type 👁 Visualizing data in Reveal (Salesforce is shown.)

More Information & Free Trial

At this point, you have created a simple dashboard from live Dynamics 365 data. For more information on creating OData feeds from Dynamics 365 (and more than 150 other sources), visit the API Server page. Download a free, 30-day trial and start working live Dynamics 365 data in tools that consume OData APIs.