Dynamics 365: Where does the "Party Number" field in the Contacts table come from?

Question

I currently have a Power Automate flow that inserts a record in the Contacts table of our Dynamics CRM when a Microsoft Form is filled out. The fields in this form consists mainly of the first / last name, organization and company. It was created a couple of years ago, but started failing when the owner of the flow left our company. I've been tasked to look into it.

When I did, I found that it was using a deprecated Dynamics 365 connector and recommended I use a Dataverse connector to insert the record. I did this, but noticed there's an additional field named "Party Number" in the contact table and it's required.

I had a look at the dynamics CRM and initially I didn't see a Party Number in the field, but when I edited the columns in the Contacts list view, I found there is a column named "Party Number":

I added this column to the view to see what values are stored. They appear to be auto-generated data:

I was wondering if you know where this field is from? I searched for information about this and found this link, which mention dual-write party model: Dataverse customers, vendors and contacts with dual-write party model and global address book app (P...

I'm not sure if this is where it's from or whether there's a way to check if this is installed in our environment. Because this field is required and the Microsoft Form doesn't have this field, I can't update the flow and am not sure if there's a way to not make the Party Number required or enter some dummy value.

Jason

Answer 1

Normally with auto number type of fields you don't have to provide any value yourself.

However, it looks like that field is set to business required. That's why it is asking you to provide a value in your Power Automate cloud flow action.

Try and workaround that by setting the value to null via an expression in the Party Number field. In the background it should still generate a new unique Party Number value for that new row.