Virtual Entity : Chapter 4 – Pulling API Endpoint Settings from Data Source Entity

Overview

This is of the four-part series tutorial where I am trying to explain virtual entity in Dynamics 365 CE. The chapters are,

• Chapter 1 - Core concept and definition
• Chapter 2 - Setting up custom data source and custom provider and hands on code
• Chapter 3 – Introducing searching capability
• Chapter 4 – Storing the settings for the api. (Current)

The demo is created on a 30 day trial edition of Dynamics 365. All the code mentioned in the tutorial is available on my Github Repo. All the customization used in the tutorial is found on releases section of the same Github repo. I have tagged the binaries as pre-release as I have not used the code in any production scenario. Although I am keeping an eye out for any possible bug reported in Github or to my email but please consider all the code as is. In the code I have integrated country Api found in this page along with the description of the each end point. A huge shout out to ApiLayer. A big thanks to Mark Findlater for reviewing the blog.

Chapter 4

The last piece of the puzzle would be how to have dynamic API settings for different environments without changing anything in the code.

In Chapter 2 of our journey we added some custom fields in our Data Source, but we have not used them yet. Now since we have connectivity between the API and Dynamics and we can search in advanced find, let’s make the Data Source truly dynamic so that we can set all the API settings and configure them on a per instance basis.

Just to jog your memory our data source record now looks like below,

The Dynamics SDK provides an interface IEntityDataSourceRetrieverService that gives you access to the source of the Entity the Custom Provider that it is attached to. The retriever service is available within the service provider of the plugin. 

First of all in my plugin code I add the following two lines,

I can then update my method that sets the settings for the api. It changes like below

So there you have it, we have created a Virtual Entity, Custom Provider, Data Source and then learned how to query and the configure the source so that we can have different API connections in our different instances. The code is available in this Github repo along with the solution. Have fun!