Dealing with the “The natural key for the table was not found” error in the Dynamics 365 Data Entity Wizard
Recently I was asked to create a data entity for the AssetTrans table in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. There isn’t a stock entity for AssetTrans, so I turned to the Data Entity Wizard to streamline the entity creation process:
It was then that I ran into the dreaded “The natural key for the table was not found” error in the Dynamics 365 Data Entity Wizard:
The problem is that the AssetTrans table uses RecId as its primary index, and the Data Entity Wizard doesn’t support tables with a RecId-based primary key. Further, we cannot add a new index to AssetTrans and set it as the natural key via a table extension, as the Primary Index parameter is disabled in table extensions.
When faced with this issue in the past I have taken a manual approach: find an existing data entity, duplicate it, and replace its contents with references to the table I wanted to specify in the wizard. This approach also required me to manually create the staging table and security privileges—not a huge burden, but significantly more work than letting the wizard take care of it for me!
This time, I tried something new. I duplicated the AssetTrans table as MyAssetTrans and created a new non-RecId based primary index for it:
I then ran the Data Entity Wizard again, using the MyAssetTrans table as the primary datasource:
This time, the wizard proceeded to the next step of selecting the fields I wanted included in the entity:
Once the wizard completed, I had my data entity, staging table, and security privileges, but I still had a problem: the entity was based on MyAssetTrans, not AssetTrans. Fortunately, all I had to do was change the Data Source on the data entity from MyAssetTrans to AssetTrans:
And I had my AssetTrans entity ready to go. If you've run into this problem, I hope this article helps! If you need more assistance, we have a great support team. Contact us to learn more.
Under the terms of this license, you are authorized to share and redistribute the content across various mediums, subject to adherence to the specified conditions: you must provide proper attribution to Stoneridge as the original creator in a manner that does not imply their endorsement of your use, the material is to be utilized solely for non-commercial purposes, and alterations, modifications, or derivative works based on the original material are strictly prohibited.
Responsibility rests with the licensee to ensure that their use of the material does not violate any other rights.