Automating Attribute creation in D365 Project Operations, Using Dataverse OData Metadata APIs for an India-Based Airline Operator’s Internal Project Operations–Finance & Operations Integration

Introduction

When integrating external business applications with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, it is common to discover that every customer requires additional fields to store information originating from ERP systems, manufacturing platforms, pricing engines, or product lifecycle management systems.

For one of our internal projects & Prospect PoC implementing product-centric integrations, we needed a way to provision these custom fields automatically during deployment. Traditionally, creating new columns involves opening the Power Apps Maker Portal, adding fields manually, publishing the table, exporting a solution, and repeating the same process across multiple environments.

While this approach works for occasional changes, it quickly becomes a bottleneck for automated deployments and CI/CD pipelines.

Business Challenge

The customer’s integration platform exchanged large volumes of product and financial information with Dynamics 365 Project Operations. Each deployment required several custom attributes such as:

1. Product identifiers
2. ERP reference numbers
3. Financial synchronization IDs
4. External integration keys
5. Processing status fields

Creating these fields manually across Development, Test, UAT, and Production introduced several challenges:

1. Manual configuration effort (time-intensive)
2. Human errors (typos, misconfigurations)
3. Environment inconsistencies (field variations across environments)
4. Longer deployment windows
5. Difficult CI/CD automation

The Objective: Allow the deployment process itself to provision any missing attributes before importing data, eliminating manual touchpoints entirely.

Why OData Metadata APIs?

Most developers use the Dataverse Web API for CRUD operations on business records. However, Dataverse also exposes Metadata APIs, allowing developers to programmatically manage the schema itself—including tables, columns, relationships, and option sets.

Microsoft documents creating attribute metadata by posting to the Attributes navigation property of an entity definition. This means integrations can:

1. Create new columns dynamically
2. Update existing metadata
3. Publish customizations instantly
4. Eliminate manual portal work
5. Scale across multiple environments consistently

Unlike traditional manual solutions, the Metadata API approach is fully programmable, auditable, and repeatable.

Implementation Procedure

Step 1 – Authenticate with Dataverse

The integration first authenticates against Azure Active Directory using an application registration and retrieves an OAuth Bearer Token. That token is then supplied with every Metadata API request.

Step 2 – Creating a Custom Attribute

The Dataverse Metadata API exposes the following endpoint for creating new attributes:

Instead of creating business records, this endpoint creates metadata at the schema level. For this implementation, we created a new string attribute with the following properties:

1. Schema Name: int_fnoid
2. Display Name: FNO ID
3. Data Type: String
4. Maximum Length: 100

The request body uses the Microsoft.Dynamics.CRM.StringAttributeMetadata type together with standard metadata properties such as SchemaName, DisplayName, RequiredLevel, and MaxLength.

Step 3 – Publishing the Metadata

Creating an attribute does not immediately make it available. Like changes made through the Power Apps Maker Portal, metadata created through the Web API must also be published. This is accomplished using the PublishXml action.

The request specifies the entity to publish. After publishing completes successfully, the new attribute immediately becomes available throughout Dynamics 365.

End-to-End Working

The complete deployment process follows these steps:

1. Integration authenticates with Azure AD.
2. Dataverse access token is generated.
3. Metadata API checks whether the required attribute exists.
4. Missing attributes are created automatically.
5. PublishXml is executed.
6. New attributes become available.
7. Product synchronization begins.
8. External systems start populating the new fields immediately.

Why This Approach Works

Real-World Use Cases

Conclusion

For an internal project and prospect PoC implementing product-centric integrations, and for prospects like India-based airline operations companies, automating metadata creation transforms what was previously a manual administrative task into a repeatable deployment process.

Rather than relying on solution imports or manual customization through the Power Apps Maker Portal, integrations can now provision required Project Operations attributes on demand using the Dataverse Metadata APIs and immediately publish them.

This approach significantly reduces deployment effort, ensures consistency across environments, and enables seamless integrations at enterprise scale. For organizations implementing Dynamics 365 Project Operations, leveraging the Metadata Web API is a powerful way to automate schema management and support modern DevOps and CI/CD practices.