Use Postman To Call D365 Data Entities

If you are writing an integration into D365 you may want to use Postman to call D365 data entities. This will allow you test the data entities and see what data your receiving application will retrieve without waiting to ask the receiving application to make the call.

Other Resources

The steps in this article can be found by looking in several Microsoft documents. However, I found that the various steps specifically for D365 were spread across several documents. And those articles also contained additional information that did apply to this scenario. So I condensed down that information into the core steps. But if you are in need of further details please check out these articles:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/data-entities/third-party-service-test

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/quickstart-register-app

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/data-entities/services-home-page#register-your-external-application

Setup Steps

First, download Postman from the following link: https://www.postman.com/downloads/

Next, before we setup Postman to call D365 Data Entities we need to do two things first:

1. Register an Azure Portal App
2. Register the external application in D365

These steps only need to be done once. I will go over these steps in this article. And then cover the actual postman setup steps in the next article.

Register an Azure Portal App

Go to portal.azure.com and login.

Register the Azure Application

Click on the hamburger in the top right corner, and then select ‘Azure Active Directory’.

Write down the ‘Tenant ID’. We will need it later. We will refer to this as the Directory ID.

Next, select ‘App registrations’ then click the ‘+ New registration’ button.

Enter in a name.

Select the radio button for ‘Accounts in this organization directory only’.

Then click the Register button.

Write down the Application (client) ID. We will need it later. Going forward, we will call this the ‘Client ID‘.

Create The Client Secret ID

Select ‘Certificates & secrets’. Then click the ‘+ New client secret’ button.

Enter in a Description for the client secret.

Set the Expires value.

Then click the ‘Add’ button.

Write down the value shown. We will need it later. Going forward we will call this the ‘client secret ID‘.

Register the external application in D365

Use a browser, and login to your D365 instance.

Then go to System administration > Setup > Azure Active Directory applications.

Select New.

Fill in the field ‘Client ID’ with the client that you wrote down after registering the app earlier in this article.

Enter in a name.

Enter in a user ID that has appropriate permissions to allow for the data entities to be called. Initially for testing, you can set this to a user ID with system administrator privileges. The click Save.

Conclusion

The two prerequisites for using Postman are complete See the second article for the steps for setting up Postman.

Peter Ramer

Peter Ramer is a part of the Managed Application Services team at RSM working on Microsoft Dynamics 365. He focuses on the Retail and Commerce industries. When he is not solving problems and finding ways to accelerate his clients' business, he enjoys time with his three kids and amazing wife.