Using Scribe Online Integration Event with Dynamics 365 Plugins - Part 1

In this four-part blog, we will look at using Scribe Online Integration Events driven by Dynamics 365 plugins to integrate to target sources using different triggers from within the CRM system.

With more and more companies wanting to have the “360 degree” view of all inner workings, data integrations have become more prevalent, and in some cases, a requirement. Most of these integrations usually have an out-of-box implementation and can be configured to connect similar system together. There are cases, however, where the source system is completely different than that of the target, and thus custom integrations must be built.

There are a plethora of tools available, including everything from custom development to pre-built drag-and-drop systems. We will be focusing on one of those drag-and-drop systems, Scribe Online by Tibco, which we used for a data integration from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to an ERP system, NetSuite.

Scribe Online is a tool built specifically for data migrations using a variety of pre-built connectors. These connectors are available for many products and are mainly used to speed up development time when building complex integrations. Scribe has two major types of integrations – Integration and Integration Event. A basic Integration solution usually gets run on-demand or can be scheduled. It starts with a query (usually) and then does some processing to push records from the source to the target. This type is usually used for initial data migrations where data only needs to be moved once and not support a continuous integration. The Integration Event can be used to manage ongoing integrations that can be triggered via different events in the source/target systems.

In Scribe Online, we started by creating a new solution in the client’s environment and selecting the Integration Event option.

Once the solution was created, we then starting building a map. There are two types of maps when working with an Integration Event solution – Create Message Map and Create Request/Reply Map. Depending on the source/target that is used, the Message Map may be a viable option. In this case, we just used the Request/Reply Map as Dynamics CRM isn’t configured for other.

We needed some way to make the integrations as flexible as possible and to avoid as much overhead as possible for the client. With this in mind, we decided to do a lot of the processing inside Scribe Online rather than on the CRM-side. We started the map out with a “Wait for Request” block. This essentially signifies that the map will wait for a request before it executes anything. When configuring this block, you can specify what parameters get passed in through the request. In our case, we decided it was best if we accepted the CRM Record ID of the record that triggered the event.

You can configure various types of parameters and should have one available for the data types that you need to pass in. In our case, we passed in the RecordId as type “Guid” as this is what CRM stores its primary keys as. When the “Wait for Request” block is configured correctly and the map saved, an Endpoint URL will be generated for that specific map.

This URL that is generated is what you use in the source system to trigger the map to run and begin processing.

In the second part of the blog, we will look at configuring entities and workflows so the integrations can be managed directly in Dynamics 365 to make it easier for the end users.