Sergey Anisimov’s Dynamics 365 Community Blog.
After watching D365 spring release’18 virtual launch events sessions, I was greatly impressed by PowerApps and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations integration session. This feature enables power users to create their own apps and seamlessly integrate them with D365 for FO even without any help from developers.
I decided to look deeper into this new feature and in order to learn more about it, I’ve decided to do it by building my own integration case.
Integration case
I decided to build the following integration case, that is very close to real life scenarios: imagine you are entering a customer data, you enter customer’s unique tax payer ID (INN) and would like to get information about the customer from a public web service.
Throughout my blog post I describe how I’ve build PowerApps application that fetches organization information (company name, address, director name, etc.) by tax payer ID and how I’ve integrated this PowerApps application with Dyn365 FO.
Choosing web service
First, I had to choose web service that will provide company data by tax payer ID (INN). There is a number of such web services in region, most of them offer free access with limited number of requests per day.
I chose web service from DaData. This service offers a lot of functions, including function for fetching company data by tax payer ID. This service works only for local companies.
Building custom web service connector in PowerApps
After we’ve chosen web service, it is time to start building custom connector for this service in PowerApps. Connector is needed to load data from web service into PowerApps application. Connector is a wrapper around an API that allows the underlying service to talk to PowerApps.
You can find detailed instructions on how you can create your own custom connector at #Build2018 session: Developing custom connectors for Microsoft Flow and PowerApps.
I will briefly describe how I created custom connector for DaData web service in PowerApps step-by-step.
First, download Postman application. This application helps to create connectors to web services end points. Since PowerApps supports Postman, it significantly reduces time needed to create custom web service connectors in PowerApps. Your can import connector definition from Postman, rather than creating from scratch.
In Postman application we enter end point URL for our web service (DaData in our case), click “Send” and check if you get correct results in response. For DaData web service authorization is done via token string and I’ve entered token value at “Headers” tab page.
web PowerApps home and import request definition from file that we’ve downloaded from Postman. So we go to “Customer connectors” and select “Import a Postman collection”.