Custom triggers in Dynamics 365 Marketing (Customer Insights - Journeys) have been magical and amazing from day one. But they recently became 1000 times better with the ability to include ‘Entity references’. What’s a custom trigger and why would you want to use one? Take a look here

There are some official docs on how to create them and some information on how it all works. But don’t believe everything you read, because there will be no ‘snippets of code’ involved - just some flow based magic is all you need! I have previously blogged about ‘Create custom Dataverse triggers for Dynamics 365 Marketing - without a developer!’ which all still stands. But there is a new type of attribute you can include in the trigger which is super powerful, cool and awesome. But also a little bit more tricky to work with when it comes to ‘triggering the trigger’.

The new attribute type is called ‘Entity Reference’. A what? Yeah I know great name right? Especially since the term ‘Entity’ was abolished in 2020 and the fact it references a specific row, not an entire table entity creates the perfect recipe for confusion. In more practical terms an ‘Entity reference’ is a way of making an entire record and all its associated records (up to 5 levels ‘deep’) available through a single trigger attribute. It works exactly the same as the ‘Contact‘ or ‘Lead’ in a trigger works, but for any table/row you choose.

Scenario

When an customer receives their order you want to send them a survey to get customer feedback and measure their NPS (Net Promoter Score). Using a custom trigger to send personalises surveys is a very common use case I come across, but having to name then map each attribute one by one is painful, plus the need to change the attributes available in the trigger often occurs too. Now instead of naming every single attribute needed from the ‘Order’ and associated tables, you can just include a reference to the specific order row in Dataverse and make all the data available in the trigger journeys for branching and emails for conditional content and personalisation.

Including the Order entity reference in the trigger is one mapping value in the flow that allows the marketer to do things such as:

• Send different details in the email based on the delivery country of the order

• Sign off the email from the Account owner or the sales person who closed the opportunity

• Delay the journey based on the delivery date

• Filter the journey based on order value

• Use data from newly added attributes, without needing to restart to development lifecycle on the trigger itself

You can include multiple Entity references too so we will also include the ‘Customer voice survey invitation’ for the unique survey URL attribute but also maybe the survey/project name could be used in journey/email variations too. Maybe other things - why not make it all available!

Create a trigger with ‘Entity References’

Setting up the trigger is really easy, set the Attribute data type to ‘Entity Reference’ and select the specific table you want to use. Add any additional attributes and mark the trigger as ‘Ready to use’.

Go to code snippet

Once the trigger is ready you will see an ‘integrate the code’ section. Select ‘Go to code snippet’. We need to find a few important piece of information here to use in our trigger.

1. Trigger name: the text between track_ and () e.g. msdynmkt_orderclosed_senddeliverynps_123456

2. Attribute names: Under ‘Properties’ you will see the name of the entity reference attributes, including ‘bindingid’ e.g. order and surveyinvite

How NOT to trigger the trigger in Power Automate

Using the technique I showed in my previous blog using Dataverse ‘Perform an unbound action’ will not work here unfortunately. The action tries to expand the entity reference to be individual columns of the table, which means you cannot populate the reference, your browser will probably crash and if you are super lucky the flow bombs out due to hitting attribute limits per action.

Trigger a custom trigger with ‘Entity References’ in Power Automate

Instead we can build our own trigger action inputs, and use a HTTP POST request.

Make it work with any custom trigger and entity reference

The beauty of custom triggers is they are unique to your needs so the image below should help to explain how you can work out your own trigger names and inputs.

And the moral of the story is if you hit your head against a flow enough times, you will find a way to make it work! Hopefully this helps you to unlock the power of entity references in custom triggers.

Entity references in the release notes