Book Image

Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations Cookbook

By : Simon Buxton
Book Image

Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations Cookbook

By: Simon Buxton

Overview of this book

Dynamics 365 for Operations is the ERP element of Microsoft’s new Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition. Operations delivers the infrastructure to allow businesses to achieve growth and make better decisions using scalable and contemporary ERP system tools. This book provides a collection of “recipes” to instruct you on how to create—and extend—a real-world solution using Operations. All key aspects of the new release are covered, and insights into the development language, structure, and tools are discussed in detail. New concepts and patterns that are pivotal to elegant solution designs are introduced and explained, and readers will learn how to extend various aspects of the system to enhance both the usability and capabilities of Operations. Together, this gives the reader important context regarding the new concepts and the confidence to reuse in their own solution designs. This “cookbook” provides the ingredients and methods needed to maximize the efficiency of your business management using the latest in ERP software—Dynamics 365 for Operations.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Creating extended data types

Extended Data Types are commonly referred to as EDTs. They extend base types, such as Strings and Integers by adding properties that affect the appearance, behavior, data (size), and table reference/relationships. This means that we can have types like Customer account that have a label, size, table relation information, and other properties that provide consistency and greater understanding within the data model.

Another example of an EDT is Name. Should we change the StringSize property of this field, all fields based on this EDT will be adjusted; and if we reduce the size, it will truncate the values to the new size.

All fields should be based on an EDT or an Enum, but they are not just used to enforce consistency in the Data model, but are used as types when writing code.

The EDT in this example will be a primary key field for a table that we will use later in the chapter.

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