A Tool To Generate Data Entity Relationship Diagram In Simplified Way In D365 FO (Enhanced)

 

This blog post walks you through the enhancement towards already created tool to generate data entity relationship diagram. Identification of related entities can be challenging and tiresome activity which might consume considerable efforts and time to generate the ERD diagram. Hence to overcome this issue, new features have been added to the existing tool to automatically identify and populate related data entities for the diagram.


Business Scenario:

Simplified Solution Inc. has asked to identify the data entities and generate ERD for the products structure configured within D365 FO on the basis of the released products.


Problem Statement:

Identifying the related entities based on the primary data entity requires manual intervention of a developer to identify the relations on each entity using visual studio. This is a challenging process and requires good amount of time and efforts to identify the related entities.


Solution:

As an enhancement to the current tool, couple of features have been added to automatic populate the related data entities for the selected primary data entity. The related data entities can be identified in 2 different ways as mentioned below:

1) Outward relations: Related entities will be identified and added to the list on the basis of the relations present on the selected data entity.

2) Inward relations: All entities where relation is defined with the selected data entity will be identified and added to the list


Pre-requisites:

Following are the pre-requisites to get this tool ready for action:

        1) Download the deployable package from GitHub

        2) Install the deployable package in your D365 FO environment (Detailed instructions available in GitHub for installation and uninstallation of the tool) 

        3) dbdiagram.io online free tool to render the relationship schema generated from D365 FO


Execution:

Let’s proceed once the above pre-requisites are complete. Following are the steps to be performed for generating the data entity relationship diagram:

 1) Navigate to System Administration >> Inquiries >> 'Generate data entity relationship schema' to open generate data entity relationship schema dialog


        2) Select the data entity manually from the lookup on 'data entity' field

 

        3) Click on 'Add data entities' button to add the entity in the 'Selected data entity list' grid below



   4) Select the entity in the list for which you have to populate the related entities. There are 2 options available to identify related entities

                a) Select “Add outward relations” if you want to add entities defined as relations on the selected entity


                b) Select “Add inward relations” if you want to add entities where selected entity is defined as a relation (Note: Will take some time to generate the first time)


        

        5) Select “Limited Data Model” to generate the schema file for entities present in the list




        6) Once the required option is selected, a schema file will be generated to be downloaded to local repository

        

        7) Open the downloaded file in a notepad




        8) Navigate to dbdiagram.io in a separate browser and click on 'Create your diagram'





 

        9) Delete the dummy script and copy the contents of the notepad into the script section of dbdiagram.io

 

        10) Voila your ERD diagram is generated and ready for use


        11) The additional properties of data entity will be displayed once you hover over the specific name of the data entity in the diagram


        12) In worst case scenario, in case if you see any errors on the generated script, resolve the same manually by providing additional information / deleting problematic line in the script section to display the ERD diagram


Conclusion:

Hope this will prove to be helpful to you in real life scenarios to quickly identify the related entities.

PS: Entities are identified on the basis of the relations created physically on the respective data entities only.

Feel free to suggest any improvements / enhancement for this tool.

Please don't forget to share this blog with your friends and colleagues as well.

Hope you enjoyed reading it.

Happy to connect one to one on LinkedIn.

 

Until next time, See You!!!


Reference to the original post


Comments

  1. MuraliApril 18, 2023 at 9:05 AM

    Thanks for this post. Is there anyway to export the entity relations with all the tables of the entity into a diagram?

    ReplyDelete

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