Use of alternate keys in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

With alternate keys, you can assure an efficient and accurate way of integrating data from external systems. It’s especially important in cases when an external system doesn’t store the record IDs (GUIDs) that uniquely identify records. The alternate keys are not GUIDs and you can use them to uniquely identify records.

You must give an alternate key a unique name. You can use one or more entity fields to define the key. For example, to identify an account record with an alternate key, you can use the account name and the account number. You can define alternate keys without writing code, or you can define them programmatically. Note that while you can define alternate keys in the user interface (UI), they can only be used programmatically, in code.

Some of the benefits of the alternate keys feature include:

  1. Faster lookup of the records.
  2. More robust bulk data operations.
  3. Simplified programming with data imported from external systems without record IDs.

Once you've created your alternate keys, you can use them as unique identifiers on your data transfers. In RAPIDI, you can add them under Table Link (key fields). When the destination system is Dynamics 365 Sales, you would always need to filter on the Source key fields that are being used in the Table link so that they are never blank. The filter will need to added on Filters Source (delimitations).