Exporting DMF files using JSON

One common question from people working with Data Management Framework in Dynamics 365 for Finance is about the possibility to use other file formats – more specifically JSON – rather than the standard ones (XML, CSV, Excel).

The answer is yes, it’s possible using a XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) file in your export project.

Before you setup your project, go to System administration > Workspaces > Data management and click on “Configure data source” tile on the left side.

Create a new data format using the following parameters:

In the data export project, add your entity using JSON as the source data format (1) and click on “View map” (2).

In the “Transformations” tab, click on “New” and “Upload file“. Once the upload is complete, close and return to the project.

Here’s a sample XSLT file:
https://github.com/ffilardi/FinOps-Tools/blob/master/xml2json.xslt

And this is the JSON output for Customers V3 entity (I’ve mapped just a couple fields to keep it short):

{
    "Document": {
        "CUSTCUSTOMERV3ENTITY": [
            {
                "CUSTOMERACCOUNT": "111",
                "CUSTOMERGROUPID": "Default",
                "ORGANIZATIONNAME": "Sample Customer 1",
                "PARTYTYPE": "Organization",
                "SALESTAXGROUP": "GST"
            },
            {
                "CUSTOMERACCOUNT": "222",
                "CUSTOMERGROUPID": "Default",
                "ORGANIZATIONNAME": "Sample Customer 2",
                "PARTYTYPE": "Organization",
                "SALESTAXGROUP": "GST"
            }
        ]
    }
}