Random notes on the Microsoft Dataverse Web API - background and historical perspective

For those new to Dataverse - previously known as the Common Data Service (CDS) - it might not seem so obvious but the modern Dataverse Web API was one of the big features of the Dynamics CRM 2016 release. So it's seen a bit of mileage already.

The goal of the D365 Web API was to make it easier to create applications across a wide variety of platforms, devices and programming languages.  The Web API is extremely well suited for developing client side components using either Javascript or Typescript but it was also meant to be used for building applications or services using other programming languages such as Python, Ruby or Java or development on non-Microsoft platforms such as mobile (Android or iOS) or cloud applications which needed to interact with Dynamics CRM Online or on-premise.

It is interesting to see that the Web API still relies on the Organization Service as the expectation was at that time that the Web API would fully replace the Organization Service quite soon. As mentioned before the Web API was released together with CRM 2016 which had version number 8.1. For an overview of the different on- premise version numbers - see Microsoft Dynamics 365 on-premises cumulative updates and to understand the way that version numbers work in the cloud see Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement release version transparency. With Microsoft sticking to the 9.x version  for a number of releases now, the statement that CRM SOAP 2011 Service Endpoint will be turned off as of v10 might still hold true.

The original ODATA v2 CRM endpoint which is now deprecated only supported CRUD operations whereas the new Web API also supported special messages and functions typical for Dynamics 365/CRM - to see the full list of actions available you can take a look at the metadata document https://[yourenvironment].crm4.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.0/$metadata - below is a screenshot with the QualifyLead action.

One of the interesting actions that you can call in this way is the RetrieveTotalRecordCount function e.g. https://[yourorg].crm4.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/RetrieveTotalRecordCount(EntityNames=['account','contact']) which provides the quickest way to retrieve the number of records for an entity/table.

OAuth authentication also became the standard authentication model for the Dynamics 365/Dataverse Web API. For code running within the context of Dataverse/CRM - e.g. web resources or PCF controls, you don't need to handle authentication separately since the authentication context is passed on. For back-end applications - you will need to register your application with Azure to use the new authentication model.

References:

• Microsoft Dataverse Web API versions
• Microsoft Dataverse Web API - Service protection limits - service protection limits are evaluated in a 5 minute (300 seconds) sliding window - the most known one is the 6000 request limit in this window but total execution time and number of concurrent requests apply as well.
• Calling Dataverse Web API in PowerShell
• Create a table row using the Dataverse Web API
• Dataverse Web API types and operations - review this for documentation on special lookups e.g. customer lookup on case(incident)
• Query data using the Web API (Microsoft Dataverse) - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs