Company and Security Concept in Dynamics 365 FO & Dataverse

Published Wednesday, September 14, 2022

In this post, we will learn how security boundaries and ownership concepts work in Dataverse and Dynamics 365 FO especially when Dual-write and Virtual entity installed.

Why should we understand?

This can lead to an incorrect design of end-to-end Cross-app solution and inaccuracy in record ownership across both the systems i.e. Dynamics 365 FO & Dataverse

What is Company abstract in Dynamics 365 FO & Dataverse?

Lets understand company concept & security concept of Dual-write and virtual entity technologies.

In my view, these concepts are very important to understand by Dynamics 365 consultant while designing the solution.

But before we talk about in detail, let's understand what a company looks like in both FnO and Dataverse.

In Dynamics 365 FO, we have a dataarea and really this is two different concepts related to others. It defines the security boundary. Dataarea is used to give the user access to tights privileges and security roles etc.

It is also a legal and reporting concept. Imagine a customer is related to a legal entity that is called a dataarea, which affects where their business is located, their trade agreements, etc.

Therefore, when you configure Dynamics 365 FO, you must choose two different manufacturing plants or stores in different countries. That will have implications for currencies in the different companies.

Overall, we discussed the dataarea, company information, and legal entity all of which are the same in D365 for Finance and Operations.

However, In the Dataverse, it is divided into two parts, it's an explicit concept.

Whats new in Dataverse for Company concept?

Those familiar with Dataverse must be familiar with the concept of the Business unit or owner, which is where security boundaries and ownership concepts are defined. In other words, business units define which records a user can see, which records he or she can modify, and so forth.

In the Dataverse, the company presents itself as a completely new concept.

The company record specifically has an outgoing foreign key relationship to the CDM_Company table in Dataverse. This allows you to have independent control over the company records associated with, separate from how that security for that particular record.

A key thing to remember

Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations

Data security boundary DataArea/Company information/ Legal Entity
Record ownership
Business process concept i.e., intercompany Company

Dataverse (Business Unit)

Data security boundary
Record ownership

In D365 FO, security & ownership are integrated with the legal entity concept, whereas in Dataverse, these are separate concepts.

Let's understand how this is implemented.

Company Data model in Dynamics 365 FO

In the salestable, there is a column called "dataareaaid" which contains the four-character company id having a relationship with the ID column of the DataArea table. A separate table called "companyInfo" in Dynamics 365 FO stores legal information about the company and the DataArea column of "CompanyInfo" table has a one-to-one relationship with DataArea table of ID column.

Company Data model in Dataverse

You can see in Dataverse a column called "Company" in the Order table that has a foreign key relationship and this shows security concepts do not directly relate to companies. Unlike D365 FO where a single column of DataArea declares the security perimeter, here in Dataverse there is a table called systemuser which maintains the business unit relationship.

Conclusion

By understanding above concepts, you will be able to understand company concepts as well as how security boundaries and ownership concepts work in Dataverse and Dynamics 365 FO especially when Dual-write and Virtual entity.