Truncate Functionality in Data Management | D365 Finance and Supply Chain Management

The Truncate functionality is a very cool feature in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management which can be used to replace data. Many of you are probably familiar with Data Management and its ability to upload data within Dynamics 365.

See the examples below showing how to use this functionality in your Dynamics 365 solution. The function is located here in your system: Organization administration > Global address book > Address > Address setup.

If we start in the zip code/postal code table, you can see that within Canada, I have set up two zip codes/postal codes and you will notice that neither of them have cities.

It would be simple enough to simply key those in manually, but let’s say you have 10,000 of them. Then it would not be so easy, and you may want to do that programmatically. This is how it works, go to: System administration > Workspaces > Data management

The easiest way to do this is is to import an Excel file with the data, and by creating a new import project.

Next you add the excel file:

And now you can import:

Without having “Truncate entity data” box set as yes, the upload file will just create extra line in the zip code/postal code table.

Using “Truncate entity data” will overwrite the old line in the zip code/postal codes table instead of creating a new separate line.

What the Truncate box does is actually remove all the data that is there wherever you are loading to based on the entity, and then adds what is in your file. This is a great approach if you ever need to clean out existing tables, especially for setup data.

If you created numbers of payments terms and you would like to “just go down to the final ones”, you do have to be careful with this feature. You cannot do this with customers or items if you already have transactions against them.

As with anything, you will want to try this in a non-production environment before using it in production. In the right situation, this is a very cool feature that is available to you in Dynamics 365.

If you have any questions about this or any other functionality in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, please contact us.