protocol Module

Structural Protocol enabling typed entity instances to be passed to records.create() and records.update().

Implement this Protocol on any entity class (dataclass, Pydantic model, hand-rolled) to enable it to be passed directly to CRUD operations without specifying the table name or converting to dict manually.

Required class variables:

• __entity_logical_name__ — Dataverse logical entity name (e.g. "account")

• __entity_set_name__ — OData entity set name (e.g. "accounts")

Required instance methods:

• to_dict() — return record payload as dict

• from_dict(data) — classmethod to reconstruct from a response dict

Example:

   from dataclasses import dataclass
   from PowerPlatform.Dataverse import DataverseModel

   @dataclass
   class Account:
       __entity_logical_name__ = "account"
       __entity_set_name__ = "accounts"
       name: str = ""
       telephone1: str = ""

       def to_dict(self) -> dict:
           return {"name": self.name, "telephone1": self.telephone1}

       @classmethod
       def from_dict(cls, data: dict) -> "Account":
           return cls(
               name=data.get("name", ""),
               telephone1=data.get("telephone1", ""),
           )

   # isinstance() works today — Protocol is runtime_checkable:
   assert isinstance(Account(), DataverseModel)

   # Type your own helpers against the Protocol now:
   def save(entity: DataverseModel) -> None:
       data = entity.to_dict()
       client.records.create(entity.__entity_logical_name__, data)