Azure Data Factory - Type of column 'allparties' is not supported, The attribute type 'CalendarRules/PartyList'

Question

I am trying to extract 'Activities' entity from Dynamics 365 Online and for a field 'allparties' which seems to be the type of 'PartyList', I am getting an error importing the schema in ADF that it's not supported. I am able to extract the entity if I remove this field from the query. According to this article from Microsoft it seems not supported in ADF at this point of time - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/connector-dynamics-crm-office-365#data-type-mapping-for-dynamics.

Is there any work around to pull the value of this field? I use XRMToolBox for the local testing and I see the values are getting pulled fine. Appreciate the pointers.

Answer 1

Hello @Satya D and thank you for your question.

Each of the supported data types map to primitive data types. The unsupported ones are complex collections, which may contain one, or many values. Not all supported sinks support collections.

At this time, the only way I can see pulling the values, is converting the PartyList to a lump of text, and unpack it on the other end.

Can you create a new text-like field on the Dynamics side which pulls the contents of the allparties and concatenates them together?

Answer 2

It's a shame that two Microsoft products can't seamlessly communicate. We're going to have to add complexity to our data integration process because of this shortcoming.