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Customer tables (account, contact, and customeraddress)

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The account and contact tables are essential for identifying and managing customers, selling products and services, and providing superior service to the customers. The customeraddress table stores address and shipping information for a customer.

Account table

The account table is one of the tables in Dataverse to which most other tables are attached or parented. In Dataverse, an account represents a company with which the business unit has a relationship. Information that is included in an account is all relevant contact information, company information, category, relationship type, and address information. Other information that applies includes the following items:

  • An account can be a parent to most table types, including another account.
  • An account can be a standalone table.
  • An account can have only one account as its parent.
  • Accounts can have multiple child accounts and child contacts.

Account management is one of the important concepts of business-to-business customer relationship management (Dynamics 365) because an organization wants to see all the activities they have with another company. All these activities come together at the account level. View the Account table reference.

Contact table

In Dataverse, a contact represents a person, usually an individual, with whom a business unit has a relationship, such as a customer, a supplier, or a colleague. The contact table is one of the tables that most other tables are linked to. A contact can be a stand-alone table. Included in this table are professional, personal, and family information, and multiple addresses. View the Contact table reference.

Both accounts and contacts are part of managing customers and are related to one another in the following ways:

  • A contact can be a parent to every other table except accounts and contacts.
  • A contact can have only one account as its parent.
  • A contact can be marked as the primary contact person for an account setting the Account.PrimaryContactId column.

The contact table stores information about a person such as an email address, street address, and telephone numbers. It also includes other related information, such as the person's birthday or anniversary date. Depending on the type of customers a business unit has, it needs either only contacts, or contacts and accounts, to give a full view of its customers.

Linking tables such as activities and notes to the contact table lets user see all the communication the user had with a customer, any actions the user took on behalf of the customer, and all information the user needs about the customer.

CustomerAddress table

This table contains more address and shipping information for customer records (account and contact). By default, Dataverse creates at least two customeraddress records in this table when a new customer record is created, even when there's no data for these records. Learn how you can change this behavior

All customeraddress records related to account and contact records are available via the Account_CustomerAddress and Contact_CustomerAddress relationships respectively. These relationships both use the parentid lookup, and the parentidtypecode column tells you the type of customer record the address is related to.

Address data embedded with customer records

You can retrieve or modify the data for the two or three embedded customeraddress records with the customer record.

  • Account records have columns address1_addressid and address2_addressid.
  • Contact records have columns address1_addressid, address2_addressid, and address3_addressid.

These columns store customeraddressid values, and there are other customer columns each prefixed with either address1*, address2*, or address3* that contain the corresponding address information from the customeraddress table.

The customeraddress addressnumber column tells you which address applies to the parent customer record columns. You can't set the addressnumber column to a value used by another customeraddress record related to the same parent customer. You can set an existing addressnumber value to 0 or null, and then change the value of another record if you want to swap the relative position of the records for the customer records. While the addressnumber value increments for each record created for a customer, other than controlling the respective embedded address position in the customer record (either 1, 2, or 3), the addressnumber column value isn't used for any other purpose.

Dataverse only updates these customeraddress records through the corresponding customer record columns instead of updating the customeraddress rows directly. However, anyone can edit these records as customeraddress records, or add more customeraddress records associated with the account or contact record that aren't embedded with the account and contact records.

Deletion of embedded customer address rows isn't allowed

By default, if you attempt to delete one of the embedded customeraddress records that are referenced in the address1_addressid, address2_addressid, or address3_addressid for a customer record, you get an error like the following:

Name: CannotDeleteDueToAssociation
Code: 0x80040227
Number: -2147220953
Message: Customer Address can not be deleted because it is associated with another object. Address Id = 4f33c2e4-d5a3-4b03-b050-21984c0e4c15, AddressNumber=2, ParentId=4b757ff7-9c85-ee11-8179-000d3a9933c9, ObjectTypeCode=1

Learn how you can change this behavior

Disable empty record creation

Because each row in the customeraddress table counts against the Dataverse capacity you pay for, you might want to minimize this cost.

You can tell Dataverse not to create empty customeraddress table rows for each customer record by changing the Disable empty address record creation setting in the Power Platform admin center. Before changing this behavior, you should consider whether you have existing customizations that depend on default behavior. Learn more about this setting

While this setting is on, no new empty customeraddress table rows are created when new customer records are created. Records are only created if the incoming payload contains address data. Normally, the payload only includes columns that have data. If there's no data for the columns, the columns aren't included in the payload and the values are null when the record is saved. However, if the payload contains address columns with values set to null, the address is created with null values. If you continue to see empty records being created, check how they're created and whether that client application is sending column data with null values.

If the Disable empty address record creation setting is switched off, the default behavior resumes. Turning on this setting doesn't delete any existing customeraddress table rows. Switching this setting back on after it was switched off doesn't re-create records that weren't created.

Detect whether empty address record creation is disabled

These example functions show how to detect whether the Disable empty address record creation setting is enabled in the environment.

This static IsEmptyAddressRecordCreationDisabled method uses the WhoAmIRequest class and the IOrganizationService.Retrieve method to check a value in the Organization.OrgDbOrgSettings column.

static bool IsEmptyAddressRecordCreationDisabled(IOrganizationService service)
{

   Guid orgId = ((WhoAmIResponse)service
         .Execute(new WhoAmIRequest())).OrganizationId;

   Entity organization = service
         .Retrieve("organization", orgId, new ColumnSet("orgdborgsettings"));

   XDocument orgdborgsettings = XDocument
         .Parse((string)organization["orgdborgsettings"]);

   XElement? element = orgdborgsettings
         .XPathSelectElement("//CreateOnlyNonEmptyAddressRecordsForEligibleEntities");

   // Return true only when the element exists and has the value of 'true'
   return element != null && element.Value == "true";
}

Delete embedded address records

By default, you can't delete embedded customeraddress table rows referenced by the address1_addressid, address2_addressid, or address3_addressid columns in customer tables. See Deletion of embedded customer address rows isn't allowed

The Enable Deletion of Address Records setting in the Power Platform admin center changes this behavior. Learn more about this setting

Detect whether deletion of address records is enabled

These example functions show how to detect whether the Enable Deletion of Address Records setting is enabled in the environment.

This static IsDeleteAddressRecordsEnabled method uses the WhoAmIRequest class and the IOrganizationService.Retrieve method to check a value in the Organization.OrgDbOrgSettings column

static bool IsDeleteAddressRecordsEnabled(IOrganizationService service)
{

   Guid orgId = ((WhoAmIResponse)service
         .Execute(new WhoAmIRequest())).OrganizationId;

   Entity organization = service
         .Retrieve("organization", orgId, new ColumnSet("orgdborgsettings"));

   XDocument orgdborgsettings = XDocument
         .Parse((string)organization["orgdborgsettings"]);

   XElement? element = orgdborgsettings
         .XPathSelectElement("//EnableDeleteAddressRecords");

   // Return true only when the element exists and has the value of 'true'
   return element != null && element.Value == "true";

}

Bulk delete of empty customer address records

After you disable empty address record creation and enable deletion of address records, you can use the following example functions to asynchronously delete empty customeraddress records using the BulkDelete message.

These functions are based on the Address (CustomerAddress) Writable columns/attributes and don't include any custom columns that might be in your environment. You might want to alter these queries if you need to include your custom columns.

The static BulkDeleteEmptyCustomerAddressRecords method creates a system job to delete empty customeradddress records using the BulkDeleteRequest class.

This method uses the example IsDeleteAddressRecordsEnabled and IsEmptyAddressRecordCreationDisabled static methods described in Detect whether deletion of address records is enabled and Detect whether empty address record creation is disabled respectively to ensure these settings are configured to allow deletion of all the empty customer address records and ensure no new ones are created.

/// <summary>
/// Create a Bulk Delete job to delete empty customer address records
/// </summary>
/// <param name="service">The authenticated IOrganizationService instance.</param>
/// <returns>The Id of the system job</returns>
/// <exception cref="Exception"></exception>
static Guid BulkDeleteEmptyCustomerAddressRecords(IOrganizationService service)
{
    if (!IsDeleteAddressRecordsEnabled(service))
    {

        throw new Exception("Enable deletion of address records" +
            " before running this method.");
    }

    if (!IsEmptyAddressRecordCreationDisabled(service))
    {

        throw new Exception("Disable empty address record creation" +
            " before running this method.");
    }

    var query = new QueryExpression("customeraddress")
    {

        ColumnSet = new ColumnSet("customeraddressid"),
        Criteria =
        {
            Conditions =
            {
                new ConditionExpression("city", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("country", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("county", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("fax", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("freighttermscode", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("latitude", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("line1", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("line2", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("line3", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("longitude", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("postalcode", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("postofficebox", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("primarycontactname", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("shippingmethodcode", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("stateorprovince", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("telephone1", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("telephone2", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("telephone3", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("upszone", ConditionOperator.Null),
                new ConditionExpression("utcoffset", ConditionOperator.Null)
            }
        }
    };

    BulkDeleteRequest request = new()
    {
        QuerySet = new QueryExpression[] { query },
        StartDateTime = DateTime.UtcNow,
        RecurrencePattern = string.Empty,
        SendEmailNotification = false,
        JobName = "Delete empty customer address records",
        ToRecipients = new List<Guid>().ToArray(),
        CCRecipients = new List<Guid>().ToArray()

    };

    var response = (BulkDeleteResponse)service.Execute(request);
    return response.JobId;

}