Today I would like to pay my respect to the free GitHub initiative Recurring Integrations Scheduler (RIS). RIS is a solution that transports files/messages between on-premises folders and D365FO. This is a way to perform good old file integrations, and even for automating import/export of data entities between environments. And without having to develop/program anything.

It calls methods exposed by D365FO to import or export files and data packages. It can also monitor status of D365FO internal processing of imported data. Based on this status it can move input files to “status” folders.

The solution is quite easy to setup, and is also quite good documented. You can download the installer here. It also means that with a few hours of reading and understanding this tool you can automate import and export of files.

I will not try to explain the solution here, but I would like to give you some screenshots on how it looks. The tool is a windows service, but have a front-end client where you can monitor that the exports and imports are running. Here I have 2 jobs. One that exports customer from D365F&O, and one that imports customers to D365F&O.

These jobs will create a set of folders where files are to downloaded or uploaded from.

So if I add a excel spreadsheet of customers to the “Upload” folder, it is automatically being sent to F&O, and the customers are imported in the Data Management Framework.

In D365 I have 2 data management projects for importing and exporting customers.

In the export(or import) project, I have the data entity, and I also need to setup the “Manage recurring data jobs“, as this automatically will export/import according to a reoccurring schedule.

In the manage scheduled data jobs, you may setup the frequency.

There is a field named “ID” in the picture above, that contains a GUID, and this the Activity Id that is used for downloading files from the D365 Blob storage.

In the RIS tool, I’m pointing the Dynamics data Job towards this activity ID. This is how RIS understands what to download or upload.

When opening the Manage Messages, we see the download/upload status of each file, until they appear in the download folder.

 

This is a great tool, that have been available for a long time. It have not received the attention it deserves. Take a look, and start making simplified integrations!

I also want to thank Tomek Melissa from Microsoft that have been driving this initiative.