Rajeev Pentyala – Microsoft Power Platform

With Dynamics Portal’s Entity list ‘OData Feed’ option, we can expose the data in the form OData API, which can be further consumed by external applications.

Lets take a scenario,

• You have a public facing Dynamics Portal where people gets registered, which get stored as ‘Contacts’ in Dynamics CE instance.
• You need to share all the ‘Active Contacts’ to your back end team which uses an Excel sheet to manage data.

It can be achieved by enabling OData feed on Entity List by following below steps:

• Open your Entity List and go tot ‘OData Feed’ section. (Refer my previous articles on how to create an Entity List)
• Enable the ‘OData Feed’ option along with below details
  • Entity Type Name : Your Dynamics entity schema name
  • Entity Set Name : Can be anything but as a best practice provide plural name of your Dynamics entity.
  • View : Select the view.  The structure of your OData feed would be determined based on the view you pick.

• Once the ‘OData Feed’ enabled, you can get all the oData feeds enabled on Portals by forming URL -> {Your Portal URL}+”/_odata“

• Now access the ‘Contacts’ oData feed by forming URL -> {Your Portal URL}+”/_odata“+Entity Set Name (i.e., contacts)

How to consume the oData API in Excel:

• Copy the OData set URL
• In the new Excel sheet, go to Data -> Get Data -> From Other Sources -> From OData Feed

• Paste the OData URL and click ‘OK’

• Click ‘Load’ to load the data to excel sheet.

• If you want to Transform data like replace ‘Null’, click on ‘Transform Data’

• Your excel sheet shall looks as below once the data loads.

Note:

• The OData API URL is accessible anonymously with no authentication prompted.

🙂