In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, OData services are used for integration. The OData REST endpoint exposes all the data entities that are marked as public. The IsPublic design-level property is all that it needs to determine whether the data entity needs to be exposed as the OData endpoint.

The following screenshot shows CustCustomerEntity in Visual Studio, with the IsPublic property set to Yes to expose the entity as the OData endpoint:

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations ships more than two thousand data entities out of the box, which includes more than 1,500 public data entities.

In addition to the out of the box data entities, customers and partners can easily extend the existing data entities or create new data entities, as per their data management and integration requirements.

An entity marked with the IsPublic property set to Yes is automatically available as an OData endpoint and can be consumed for various tools and purposes, such as third-party client applications for integration, Microsoft Office for data export/import, or any other client applications that can consume OData feeds.

In the next few sections, we'll explore how to query, browse, and consume OData services for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.