Use synthetic relationships to expose more Business Central data in Dataverse

Enabled for	Public preview	General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts	Mar 4, 2024	Apr 2, 2024

Business value

Use virtual tables when you synchronize data between Business Central, Dataverse, and other Dynamics 365 apps to enhance the value of your Dynamics 365 investment. Virtual tables remove boundaries between Dynamics 365 apps and make your data accessible to users in their preferred app.

Feature details

You can share data between Business Central, Dataverse, and other Dynamics 365 apps in two ways:

• Use data synchronization to copy data between Business Central and Dataverse.
• Use virtual tables so data resides in Business Central but you can view it from Dataverse.

When you synchronize data between Business Central and Dataverse, you can add a synthetic relationship between synchronized data and data in virtual tables. This relationship enriches the data you set up to synchronize from Business Central with data you don't synchronize, without help from a developer.

To set up synthetic relationships, use the Enable action on the Available Virtual Tables page. For more information, see Use virtual tables to get more data.

When you make virtual tables available, you create synthetic relationships on the Dataverse Connection Setup page by selecting Virtual Tables and then selecting Synthetic Relations.

On the Synthetic Relations page, select New to run the New Synthetic Relation assisted setup guide. The guide helps you create a new synthetic relationship.

Select the Native Dataverse Table (for example, CRM Account) that you use to synchronize data between Business Central and Dataverse. Select the Virtual Dataverse Table (for example, Purchase Invoice) or one of the other virtual tables you enable on the Available Virtual Tables page. Select Next to go to the next step in the guide.

You can use up to three fields to define the relationship from the New Synthetic Relation guide. You can choose how many fields to use in the How many fields to connect the tables field. Then, specify the fields for the relationship by choosing the fields to match in the Field in the "(native)" table and Field in the "(virtual)" table fields. Select Next to validate the relationship and go to the last step.

The last step in the guide lets you specify whether the guide creates the relationship and, if needed, the keys to support that relationship. Select Finish to start the operation.

Select Manage in Dataverse to model more relationships between virtual tables in Dataverse.

You see the effect of setting relationships between native (synchronized) tables and virtual tables when you open an account record that you couple to Business Central in Sales.

When you select Sales Shipments in Sales, you see shipments related to the selected account according to the relationship.

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