Microsoft Dynamics CRM entities represent Microsoft Dynamics CRM metadata. You can import the metadata from any entity available in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM organization. When you import from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the Designer displays the entities available in the organization in a hierarchical order. The relationship between the entities can be one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, many-to-one, or self-referential. Design the mappings according to the entity relationships in the sources and targets to maintain the integrity of data.

The Designer imports the following properties of the attributes in an entity:

Schema Name
Display Name
Datatype
Precision
Scale
Required Level
Description of the attribute

The Designer displays all the entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Some entities may not be readable or writable.

You can edit the source or target definitions after you import the entities. You can read data from attributes of datatype entity_name but cannot write data.

You cannot import the logical attributes and picklist attribute directly. You can create lookups to read and write these attributes. For example, you cannot read or write data to ParentCustomerIdName in the Contact entity. You can do a lookup on the Account Entity and Contact Entity to read or write data to ParentCustomerIdName.

When you write an attachment for an annotation or note entity, encode the file as a base64 string. When you read an attachment from a Microsoft Dynamics CRM source, the attachment is read as a base64 encoded string. You may need to decode the string to binary if you use binary fields in other targets or transformations. The default size of an attachment is 5 MB.