M365 Show Podcast

Exposing Dynamics 365 APIs via Custom Connectors in Power Platform


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Ever tried connecting Power Automate to Dynamics 365, only to hit a brick wall with the standard connector? You're in the right place. Today, we're exposing the exact steps to break through those limitations—no more workarounds or hair-pulling. Curious to see how custom connectors can instantly solve your toughest integration headaches?What Happens When Standard Connectors Hit a Wall?If you’ve ever built a flow and reached the finish line only to realize the Dynamics 365 connector won’t fetch that one field, you’re not alone. It’s strangely common. You might have all the standard triggers and actions set up, but the moment you need something beyond basic records—a custom table, a calculated column, or more flexible filtering—it just doesn’t show up. Suddenly, your flow is only half as useful as you hoped. And the worst part? It’s not obvious at first glance which pieces are missing. It feels like staring into the fridge at 6 p.m.—plenty of stuff there, but nothing that adds up to an actual meal.Picture a typical team trying to use Power Automate to manage daily business processes in Dynamics 365. Maybe it’s about moving customer leads from point A to point B or syncing support tickets to an external dashboard. Everything should just connect. But when the process calls for grabbing a value from a custom entity—let’s say “Warranty Claims” or “VIP Account Status”—the standard connector just shrugs. That data simply isn’t exposed. So, someone prints out a report, walks across the hall, and starts copying values by hand. It’s 2024, and we’re suddenly back to the days of double-entry. If you’ve ever listened to coworkers grumble about retyping the same number in two different systems, you know the feeling. There’s just that undercurrent of “why exactly are we doing this?”The workaround phase starts here. People give up on automation and settle for a parade of Excel downloads, copy-paste sessions, or, if they're more daring, spinning up some half-documented flow that scrapes data from emails or exports. Meanwhile, every new request gets punted back to IT with the same answer: “Sorry, the connector doesn’t support that.” The reality is, manual workarounds aren’t just slow. They’re open invitations for mistakes. Typing errors, missed updates, and mismatched data have a way of stacking up. And those little discrepancies—or big ones, depending on your luck—turn into lost revenue, bad reporting, or frustrated clients down the line.If you zoom out to watch a full week in one of those organizations, you’ll see some classic symptoms. Someone spends part of every Friday yelling at their screen because a scheduled flow ran but didn’t actually update the critical custom field. Monday rolls around and someone else spots the error, but only after a customer points it out. Management holds another meeting to talk about “digital transformation.” Meanwhile, teams are resending invoices and apologizing for delays that automation was supposed to fix in the first place. Microsoft’s forums and Power Users groups are full of threads where admins plead for help getting data out of custom entities or applying more advanced filters—usually met with a mixture of sympathy and “you’ll probably need a custom connector for that.”Advanced filtering is another big source of frustration. Let’s say you want to pull only records changed in the last 48 hours, or filter based on a calculated status. The default connector might handle simple queries, but the moment you want to slice data a bit finer, you hit restrictions. This isn’t just a technical nuisance—these missed granular details might mean your sales dashboard isn’t up to date, or your compliance workflow skips over key cases. For some teams, the inability to fetch a small detail from Dynamics means the automation puzzle just never gets finished. There’s always a piece missing.You can see the pattern repeat in every discussion about Power Platform’s promise versus the actual day-to-day. The marketing says automate everything, connect anything, let your teams focus on what matters. The lived reality for admins and business users is a bit messier. Instead of eliminating busywork, sometimes Power Automate just reshuffles it, moving the manual effort from the field team to a “data specialist” toggling between screens. When a connector doesn’t surface the one field you need or fails to trigger on an event unique to your business, you’re left asking: Is this actually making things better, or just making the same work look more modern?Plenty of interviews and community Q&As showcase that irritation. Power Platform forums are filled with folks wrestling with the same handful of limitations, swapping tales of feature requests, add-on solutions, and of course, workarounds that involve more steps rather than fewer. It’s not a niche problem. In fact, mentioning “custom connectors” in those spaces is almost like using a secret password that signals you’ve moved beyond the basics and are ready to actually solve the problem—without waiting for Microsoft to add support three releases from now.If you’ve ever felt that sense of frustration—seeing a world of automation just out of reach, thanks to a missing connector feature—you’re not imagining things. The spot where the standard connector gives up is usually where the business needs things to “just work.” And if you don’t stop to notice those gaps, you can end up automating a workflow that still needs just as much manual cleanup.So, the very first step is to actually pinpoint which Dynamics 365 endpoints or features aren’t supported—because once you’re clear on exactly what you’re missing, you can finally decide if building your own connector is the answer. For most people, though, the question that follows is: even if you know the connector can’t help, how are you supposed to find that hidden Dynamics 365 API endpoint you actually need?And this is usually where things start to get a lot more interesting.Finding the Right Dynamics 365 APIs—Without Losing Your MindIf you’ve ever tried to pull a single field out of Dynamics 365 using Power Platform, you know the documentation rabbit hole that follows. You realize it’s not about just finding an API—it’s figuring out which of the hundreds of options actually gets you what you want. Dynamics 365 exposes a massive set of APIs, and every time Microsoft changes a feature or renames something, another endpoint surfaces somewhere in the mix. It’s less like opening a neatly labeled toolbox, and more like sorting a drawer where every tool half-matches the label.So, let’s say you’re staring at your flow, blocked by the standard connector. You’re ready to hunt that missing data field, but now the real detective work begins. The official docs are thick enough to double as a doorstop, and even with a map it’s not always clear which route to take. Sometimes you think you’ve pinned down the right API, only to find that it’s deprecated or missing the action you need. Other times, you stumble onto endpoints marked as “preview” with a quiet warning that they may change any time. Then there’s the maze of naming—one entity is listed as “accounts” in one corner, “customer” in another, and the table name might use an older term from Dynamics CRM days.If you’ve been at this for a while, you know how quickly an afternoon can disappear just trying to match real business needs with the right endpoints. The kicker is, some endpoints seem designed for legacy clients, some use OData v4, some are tailored to newer Web API conventions, and others only exist for backward compatibility. Let’s not even start on SOAP. Just unlocking the specifics about which endpoint lines up with your custom data model can feel like reading a crossword puzzle where half the clues are swapped out every version.Here's where things can really go sideways. Say your business has a custom entity—maybe “Warranty Claims,” “Special Pricing Configs,” or some edge-case table from an ISV solution. You search the documentation, but no clear API reference jumps out. Instead, you flip through forum posts and realize others have hit the same wall. One admin spends a night digging through the metadata browser, another runs Fiddler to watch what happens when the Dynamics UI loads that data, and a third just gives up and calls for outside help. Even getting the entity name spelled correctly is an adventure—schemas, logical names, display names, and case sensitivity can all trip you up.When the endpoint finally surfaces, it might not quite fit what you imagined. Maybe it returns all records, but filtering is awkward. Or it wants a totally different authentication flow. Worse, sometimes you get access to more data than you intended, raising the risk of leaking sensitive records if you aren’t careful with permissions. Suddenly, what should have been a simple data retrieval becomes a game of “what did I just expose, and who can get to it?” Everyone wants that Goldilocks zone: not too much data, not too little, and only what your business role actually needs.A lot of teams rely on Microsoft’s API Explorer, and it’s actually a strong starting point—when it works. It lets you probe the available endpoints, poke around with live queries, and see how Dynamics interprets your requests. But if you want a deeper dive, tools like Postman or Fiddler give you a window into what’s really happening under the hood. By capturing traffic between your browser and the Dynamics server, you can reverse-engineer the exact requests the UI is making—sometimes exposing unofficial endpoints that don’t show up anywhere in the documentation. Fair warning: that shortcut comes with its own risks, since undocumented APIs can disappear overnight.There’s a learning curve around permissions, too. Not every API you discover will honor your security model. You might get a 401 error, or worse, find out your test user can see data they shouldn’t because a misconfigured privilege in Dynamics was copied forward into the

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M365 Show PodcastBy Mirko