This blog article outlines how the Cloud service structure for DocumentsCorePack works. Once a customer sends a document generation request the service will grab the request from Dynamics 365, retrieve the data, generate the document and push it back to Dynamics 365. Afterwards, the document can be accessed by customers.    

As you can see in  the figure below, the sequence of the document generation is as follows:

Figure 1: DocumentsCorePack Online Scheme

1) Document Generation Request:
Once a document generation request is triggered by a Dynamics 365 user or from a Workflow, a Dynamics 365 record called "AutoMergeWorkingItem" fets generated in Dynamics 365. Documents requests can be sent manually from our user-driven document generation wizard. Also, document requests can be triggered from within Dynamics 365-Processes using our Process integration. 

2) Push Request to Document generation service in the Cloud:
As soon as the AutoMergeWorkingItem is saved, a web URL is called. This URL tells the Cloud-service that there is a new document to generate sitting in the Dynamics 365 environment. There is no data transfer at this point.

3) Document Generation:
The Cloud-service connects to Dynamics 365 using Dynamics 365 web services (secure communication via https) and loads both, the document to generate (template) and the Dynamics 365 data needed inside the document. There is no information stored on the VM that hosts the cloud service except debugging is activated - in that case, the data fetched from Dynamics 365 will show up in debug-files. 

4) Send document back to Dynamics 365:
The generated document is sent back to Dynamics 365 using web services (secured communications via https). The document itself is never stored on the VM. 

Please note: To communicate from the cloud-service to Dynamics 365 we use Server2Server authentification without the need to store login credentials on our end. 

IMPORTANT: Customers with security concerns regarding our document generation services are eligible to install DCP either on their own Azure VM or on local hardware. Please note that for performance reasons an installation in the VM is recommended. 

For Dynamics 365 Online customers the document generation service will be hosted in our Azure account. To ensure high performance it will be located in the same datacenter the Dynamics 365-instance itself is located. The installation can be done directly from our website http://www.mscrm-addons.com. 

That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.