In the previous Dynamics365 SDK, accessing metadata required that you go through a completely different service to get at the structure of your data.  With the WebApi, this has changed to simply be another querystring string call to get at your information.

Ignoring how to setup a connection, the query can be as simple as this;

string dataResponse = DynamicsHelper.Instance.GetFromDynamics("/api/data/v9.0/EntityDefinitions?$select=MetadataId,SchemaName");

Where my request for the name and id of all entities in the system is sent via EntityDefinitions.

At this stage in your query, you cannot filter out which entities you want to query for due to the fact that functions such as “contains” are not supported in this interface, thereby forcing you to do this client-side instead of during your trip to the server.

In my scenario I only wanted to return entity

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I’ve blogged about connection setup with the Dynamics Web API over the last little while – Getting it Setup and how to use with the USD.

One critical piece that I forgot (or rather overlooked) that needs to be mentioned is what is called the “Headless” connection.  This is a connection to your Dynamics tenant that does not use a Username or Password combination and does not prompt the user to enter in their credentials when accessing.

In my previous examples, my Application type was “native”, however, for this to work in a headless modality in a web api world, this needs to be configured as Web app / API.  If not configured this way, you will always be prompted for access to your Dynamics

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In my previous posts on using the Dynamics Web Api, I invested a significant amount of time in figuring out the connection protocols, querying and accessing data from the results (not being an Azure, Active Directory or JSON expert).

However, when it came to saving data, the hard work was over and I was able to do with relative ease.

To save data via the Dynamics Web API, the interface is quite similar to how you would access your controls via LateBinding except that instead of the Entity object you are consuming a JObject.

JObject phoneCall = new JObject();
 phoneCall["subject"] = "Here comes my call";
 phoneCall["phonenumber"] = "888-999-7777";
 phoneCall["scheduledend"] = DateTime.Now;
 phoneCall["description"] = "Who called me.";
//The Direction Code is always an incoming call.
 phoneCall["directioncode"] = false;

string recordId = string.Empty;
 try
 {
 HttpClient httpClient =															
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So after I worked that whole plural entity name thing on getting data from Dynamics, I now had my data coming back to me in a wonderful Json format.  When interacting with data from the Web API you query for information via the rest interface of your URL. (more on MSDN).

As an example, if I wanted to retrieve some information on a custom entity I could do it using this query syntax.

HttpResponseMessage response = await httpClient.GetAsync(dyanmicsTenant + "/api/data/v8.1/enc_medias?$select=dat_name,_dat_customer_value,dat_dataid&$filter=dat_name eq '" + SearchParameter + "'");

Which would return a Json package in the format of

{
"@odata.context":"https://myCrmTenant.crm.dynamics.com/api/data/v8.1/$metadata#datas(dat_dataid,dat_name)","value":[
{
"@odata.etag":"W/\"874140\"","dat_dataid":"fd95bfa1-ddb8-e711-8114-c4346bdcf161","_dat_customer_value":"{00665E23-779E-4C8C-A5D4-36213C41EA27}","dat_name":"0000000006"
}
]
}

A few things…

What is _dat_customer_value?

In my query, I wanted to get the lookup for a customerid, the field itself is called data_customerid, however, when accessing lookups you must prepend “_” to the field and append “_value” to the

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