Using Dynamic 365 Service Endpoints - Part 1

Dynamics 365 offers various possibilities for integrating with 3^rd party systems, one of them is using a Service Endpoint, which is a fancy way of calling the Azure Service Bus, which can be used for integrating with 3^rd party systems.

In reality things are a bit more complicated and will be discussed in a future post.

In this example we will create a Service Bus queue that will receive any new Search Engines so that these can be processed by a single 3^rd party system.

1. Create Azure Service Bus Queue

From the Azure Portal

1. Create a Namespace




2. Create a Queue




3. Add SAS Policy

2. Register Service Endpoint

In order to register a Service Endpoint we will need the connection details for the Queue, which can be obtained from the Azure Portal.

1. Register New Endpoint




2. Add Connection Details




3. Complete Registration



The Message Format is important as the code needed to read the messages will be different depending on the format.











Register New Step


Bear in mind that it needs to be registered against the service endpoint itself.



This is what we've ended up with

3. Test

We create a new Search Engine



We can see that the message has been sent on Azure Portal



4. Processing Queue Messages

The code used to process the Queue messages can be found here and the full VS Solution can be found here.

Some of the code has been pilfered from the CRM Samples and updated it to work with the latest version, at the time of writing of Azure Service Bus.

The verbosity of the messages is peculiar and it would be nice to be able to do something similar to plug-in  (Pre/Pro)EntityImages, namely just send a few parameters.

In this highly contrived exampled we might just need to send two parameters (name and url) to our 3_rd party system, yet ~ 5 KB of data are sent.