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Use the Web API with Dynamics 365 metadata

 

Applies To: Dynamics 365 (online), Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2016, Dynamics CRM Online

You can perform any of the metadata operations with the Web API that you can perform using the organization service. This section provides guidance about how to use the Web API with the entity types included in Web API Metadata EntityType Reference.

There are four entity set paths exposed to perform operations with metadata entities as described in the following table.

Entity Set Path

Description

[Organization URI]/api/data/v8.2/EntityDefinitions

Contains EntityMetadata EntityType entities.

[Organization URI]/api/data/v8.2/RelationshipDefinitions

Contains ManyToManyRelationshipMetadata EntityType and OneToManyRelationshipMetadata EntityType as both inherit from RelationshipMetadataBase EntityType.

[Organization URI]/api/data/v8.2/GlobalOptionSetDefinitions

Contains globally defined BooleanOptionSetMetadata EntityType and OptionSetMetadata EntityType entities as both inherit from OptionSetMetadataBase EntityType.

[Organization URI]/api/data/v8.2/ManagedPropertyDefinitions

For internal use only.

Each metadata entity type uses MetadataId as the unique identifier property, which it inherits from the MetadataBase EntityType. While all metadata entities have a MetadataId, you can’t query all of them directly. For example, you can query and perform operations on attributes only in the context of the EntityMetadata entity that contains them.

These entities have some substantial differences from the entities that store business and application data, for example:

  • The properties for metadata entities use many of the complex and enum types defined in Web API ComplexType Reference and Web API EnumType Reference rather than the primitive data types used for properties in entities that inherit from crmbaseentity EntityType.

  • Metadata entities follow a different naming convention and maintain the Pascal Case naming style used in the assemblies of the organization service.

  • Metadata entities make more extensive use of inheritance, which requires that you may need to perform casts to retrieve the data that you want.

In This Section

See Also

The metadata and data models in Microsoft Dynamics 365
Browse the metadata for your organization
Use the Organization service with Dynamics 365 metadata
Use the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Web API

Microsoft Dynamics 365

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