How many of you have heard about CDM and CDS? These two
components are availabe on Microsoft platform. CDM stands for Common Data Model and CDS is
Common Data Service.
CDM is a secured database stored on Microsoft Azure, which
contains business standard entities. Those entities can be used by users for
various purposes including integrations. This is commonly used for integrating
two Microsoft Systems, with the help of templates/entities.
CDS is a basically a service, that utilizes common data
model to enable cross platform reporting capabilities. It is most commonly used
on Power BIs for report generations.
Scenario
Think of a scenario, where some application uses common data
service for storing the data. And some application uses Office 365 SharePoint as the
storage point. And both of these applications deals with the same data sets. In
this case, both of these storage system needs to be synchronized.
The solution which we are looking at may not be a full end
to end solution, but let’s see how we can push data from SharePoint to CDS. There
might be many ways, but here let’s look how it can be done easily using
Microsoft Flow with just configurations.
Configuring Flow and CDS Environment
Microsoft Flow provides connectors, with multiple triggers
and actions. Since the trigger is going to be Office 365 SharePoint, we will only be
looking at actions from CDM.
If you haven’t created database, you can create the databases
from admin center of Flow/PowerApps.
In this case, I will be using preview entities option available. The entities
can be accessed using power apps platform.
Create an entity and add necessary fields.
And the list is created at SharePoint with the name “books”. Now go to flow platform, and create a new flow from blank.
- Create a trigger for the list item, which is “when an item is created”.
- Add an action. In the action search for common data service connector and select create a new record action.
Note: when prompted for connection details, provide the user
credentials where common data service is available. In this case, it is the
same user.
- Then in the action, select the organization name, entity (which we have created above), title of book, author and sharepoint id details. Here Primary name is sharepoint list item title, Author is created by user display name from SharePoint, sharepoint:id is SharePoint list item ID (To be inserted using output properties from the trigger). SharePoint ID should be converted to integer before storing on CDS.
Test the Flow
Go to Office 365 SharePoint list, and create a new item. Once flow successfully
runs, go to entities to check the data created.
Now, the applications can be integrated using CDS in multiple ways. It can be PowerApps, Power BI, etc.
