Custom Virtual Table provider with CRUD operations: Introduction and scenario – part 1 of 6

Hi,
in this series of six posts I will speak about Virtual Tables. I will show you through a simple PoC with a step by step approach the new support of CRUD operations.

I would say that a new era of integrating our Dataverse with external systems has just started!

If before this update the Virtual Tables were used relatively little in integrations given the big limit of the read-only support, now with the support for the Create, Update and Delete operations the scenario is totally redefined.

If this is your first time hearing about Virtual Tables, I try to quickly summarize what they are. Virtual Tables are in effect a special type of table definition in Dataverse that allow the integration of data residing in external systems by transparently representing such data as tables in Microsoft Dataverse, without data replication.

SCENARIO

In this simple PoC, I supposed the following architecture:

In these posts I will show you how to build a Custom Virtual Table provider with CRUD operations:

• Creating a table on Azure SQL database (part 2)
• Implementing CRUD plug-ins and registering the assembly (part 3)
• Creating data provider and adding plug-ins to the provider (part 4)
• Creating a virtual table in Dataverse environment (part 5)
• Create, update, view, and delete records using a virtual table and final considerations (part 6)

I will proceed to publish one post at a time (every 2 days) in order to give you the opportunity to follow and carry out all the phases calmly. In any case, in the last post I will also give you the link of the GitHub repository where you can download the source code of the PoC.

Hope it helps, follow this serie and happy reading!

Here the link to my original post on capuanodanilo.com.