How to Duplicate Data Entity in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (D365F&O)

Duplicating a data entity manually

• In this article, we will duplicating a data entity for customer table.
• A data entity represents a meaningful set of data in Dynamics 365 for Operations.For instance, a data entity could be created for a customer that contains information from various database tables that define what a customer is, e.g., name, payment information, addresses, etc. A data entity organizes all this data in a way that’s convenient to handle and allows users to work with the entity itself to import or export data, rather than having to import or export individual tables.

Key concepts

1. Duplicating a data entity in Microsoft Visual Studio manually.
2. Enabling a data entity for data management and OData services.

But the question is how we will justify that which data entity is latest as there may be more then one data entity available for particular table. To find that right click on CustTable and click on Find references option as shown below.

As we check from below image that there might be CustCustomerV3Entity is latest. 

Now open CustCustomerV3Entity  from AOT as below.

Now we are going to create duplicate data entity of CustCustomerV3Entity in our VS project as below.

Now rename duplicated entity and give appropriate name like below.

Now most import steps to do some changes in the property of duplicated entity..

Data Entity Property	Value
Data Management Enabled	Yes
Data Management Staging Table	Give appropriate "unique" name
Is Public	Yes
Label	Give appropriate "unique" label name.
Public Collection Name	Give appropriate "unique" collection name
Public Entity Name	Give appropriate "unique" entity name.

Now right click on your duplicated data entity to regenerate staging table as display below.

Generally developers forget to create Security and Privileges for duplicated data entity. if you forget to create it system will gives you an error at the time of Build or Sync. of your VS project.To create Security and Privileges follow below steps.

Right click on your project à Add à New Item

We have to create two security privileges for duplicated data entity.

1. Read

2. Delete

Now we must have to do build and sync. of our project by selecting the Build Project menu item on the Project menu. 

Now we can check our duplicated data entity is available in front end to import or export customer records using Data Management.

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