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Article | Stuart Elcocks | 25/03/2023

Connecting to Dynamics using User credentials

In some situations you may need to connect to your dynamics instance using user credentials.

User accounts use an application registration to authenticate against.

Note

The user account must have a Dynamics licence assigned for the connection to work

Once the application is registered and an account has been identified in Dynamics for use then the connection block would look something like below.

{ 
  "targetenvironment": { 
     "userCredentials": { 
        "username": "test@test.onmicrosoft.com", 
        "password": "Pas5w0rd", 
        "clientId": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000", 
        "tenantId": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
     },
     "url": "https://{yourdynamicsinstance}.crm11.dynamics.com" 
  }, 
  "type": "drm.crmbaseentity/workflows", 
  "apiVersion": "2023-01-09", 
  ...
}
Note

Admin consent needs to be granted on the application registration api permissions. Further information on this can be found here.

Warning

For a successful connection using user credentials, MFA must be turned off on the account.

Prerequisites

  1. An existing application registration setup in Azure. We will reference this in the walkthrough. To setup an App Reg Connection follow this guide.
  2. A Dynamics environment with system administrator access, this is the environment you will deploy the template too.
  3. PowerShell with the DRM module installed. Follow this guide to install the powerhsell module

Create a template

Let's create a template that will create a new contact

Create a new file called 'usercredsdrm.json' and copy the json template below.

{
  "$schema": "https://schemas.drmtemplates.io/2021-03-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
  "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
  "resources": [
    {
      "targetenvironment": {
        "userCredentials": { 
          "username": "<your user account>", 
          "password": "<your password>", 
          "clientId": "<your app reg client id>", 
          "tenantId": "<your tenant id>"
        },
        "url": "<your dynamics url>"
      },
      "type": "drm.crmbaseentity/contacts",
      "apiVersion": "2023-01-09",
      "name": "DrmDemo_contacts",
      "properties": {
        "data": [
          {
            "contactid": "a209aa4c-90ab-ec11-983f-002248836dab",
            "fullname": "Testing DRM UserCreds"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}
Warning

We advise not to leave sensitive information like account passwords as plain text. If this was being used in an ADO pipeline then the password could be retrieved from an ADO variable or keyvault.

Deploy the template

To deploy the template run this command in your PowerShell session.

New-DrmDeployment -TemplateFile '<absolute path to your template>'

Log into your Dynamics environment and search for a contact with a fullname of Testing DRM UserCreds

Next steps

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