Looking for the best approach/solution to manage the real time integrations between E-Commerce portal and Business Central using Azure services.

Question

Looking for the best approach/solution to manage the real time integrations between E-Commerce portal and Business Central using Azure services.

Ancy 6

Hello,

We would like to understand the best approach/solution to manage the real time integrations between E-Commerce portal and Business Central. We want to go with the Azure services for that. Can anyone suggest what should be the best Azure service to manage the real time integration?

Lohith Goudagere Nagaraj 0 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2023-05-11T15:49:41.52+00:00

Hi,

Typical practice to integrate between your portal & business central is to expose an API which would integrate with Business Central. You can have Azure Functions as a API layer which interacts with Business Central securely. You can have your e-commerce portal communicate with azure functions by invoking endpoints on your function app. Communication between portal & function can be secured using OAUTH flow.

Another way is to have your portal communicate with your API layer. If the action can be performed asynchronously - let the API drop a message to a queue like Azure Storage Queue or Azure Service Bus. Let another function listen to the queue or service bus queue & will perform operation on Business Central accordingly

Dont expose business central apis directly to your portal.

Hope this helps.

Note: If you think my response solved your question, please consider marking my response as an accepted answer.

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Lohith Goudagere Nagaraj 0 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2023-05-11T15:49:41.52+00:00

Hi,

Typical practice to integrate between your portal & business central is to expose an API which would integrate with Business Central. You can have Azure Functions as a API layer which interacts with Business Central securely. You can have your e-commerce portal communicate with azure functions by invoking endpoints on your function app. Communication between portal & function can be secured using OAUTH flow.

Another way is to have your portal communicate with your API layer. If the action can be performed asynchronously - let the API drop a message to a queue like Azure Storage Queue or Azure Service Bus. Let another function listen to the queue or service bus queue & will perform operation on Business Central accordingly

Dont expose business central apis directly to your portal.

Hope this helps.

Note: If you think my response solved your question, please consider marking my response as an accepted answer.

Answer 1

Hi,

What platform do you use for E-Commerce? By Business Central I assume you are talking about dynamics 365 Business Central?

The lightest and faster combination would be Azure Event Hub with Azure Functions. You can also use Event hub with Logic Apps. Logic Apps is a little more expensive but easier to use and faster to develop.

If the Volume is not too high, you can also use Event hub with Power Automate.

One thing to bear in mind when using Event Hub is parallelism. Both Azure Functions and Logic apps can create duplicates if the integration logic is too long, and several parallel instances are allowed.

Azure Service Bus is a more robust option. Service bus offer peek-lock to avoid a parallel instance to process the same message. Service Bus with Logic apps offers the simplest option with more features.

Bear in mind either Bus or Hub can eventually fail. Very rare but can happen. You need to add some architecture to capture any failure (logs, consolidation reports)

You also may want to enable duplication detection and define some duplication rules.

some more on my blog: https://brunolucas.blog/2023/03/19/azure-event-hub-vs-service-bus-for-dataverse-or-graph-api/

I have this code samples: https://github.com/BrunoLucasCloud/Dataverse_Azure_Integration

Good to have a look, but need some refining I'll be adding soon.

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Looking for the best approach/solution to manage the real time integrations between E-Commerce portal and Business Central using Azure services.

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