TimHanewich.Cds 0.2.1

TimHanewich.Cds

A lightweight library for interacting with Microsoft's Common Data Service (CDS), the native data storage service of Microsoft's Power Platform and Dynamics 365 platform.

This library alleviates the need to create custom HTTP requests to interact with the CDS. After providing the service with a few parameters, you can easily interact with the CDS through the traditional CRUD operators.

Initializing the CDS Service

Place the following import statements at the top of your code file.

using TimHanewich.Cds;  
using Newtonsoft.Json;  
using Newtonsoft.Json.Linq;

Create a new CDS Service

CdsService cds = new CdsService("YourOrgName", "YourAccessToken");

In the above example, replace "YourOrgName" with the organization name for your environment. For example, if your environment URL is https://org109a2adc0.crm.dynamics.com/, your org name is "org109a2adc0".

Also replace "YourAccessToken" with the access token that you have received after authenticating a user via an OAuth flow. Instructions on how to do this can be found in https://github.com/TimHanewich/Microsoft-Graph-Example/blob/master/CommonDataServiceExample.cs

Creating a record

We will use the CreateRecordAsync method of the CdsService to create a new record. This method accepts two parameters:
setter - the setter (schema) name of the entity. This can be found by going to https://<your_org_name>.crm.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.0/ in an authenticated window.
object_json - The JSON content of the record that you are creating.

A complete example of initializing a CDS Service and creating a new account record:

CdsService cds = new CdsService("YourOrgName", "YourAccessToken");
await cds.CreateRecordAsync("accounts", "{\"name\":\"123 Industries\"}");

Reading, Updating, and Deleting

The reading, updating, and deleting methods are very similar to the CreateRecordAsync method that is detailed above. The only difference is that these three methods also have a parameter called id which serves as the unique identifier of the record that you are trying to transact on.
This id parameter is the GUID value associated with the record that you can find in Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform CDS portal.