Showing posts with label XrmToolBox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label XrmToolBox. Show all posts

Saturday 10 July 2021

Modeling and working with data on the Dataverse within the Power Platform

The Common Data Model - Is an industry agreed approach to storing commonly used data.  Use it to store applications across your company/organisation.  Results in a single source of truth instead of multiple copies with data contained in different schema's.

Two types of relationships namely: 1:N and N:N (Dataverse hides the associate entity/intersect entity that is created in the background).  

Use "Option Sets" for small static data and use "Lookups" for larger or changing data.  In Multiselect Option sets for N:N relationships, rather use "Lookups".

SSMS can be used to view data using T-SQL, better to use "SQL 4 CDS" as it provides a full ability to work with data within the XrmToolBox.

XrmToolBox - is a 3rd party download that has a ton of contributed tools and there are good options for modelling data.  This is a collection of tools that are unbelievably useful and get continually updated and new tools added.

Excel and browser plugins - Can be used to import/export data and there are some nice Edge/Browser plugins to help such as "Level up for Dynamics 365/Power Apps".  Level up for Dynamics 365/Power Apps is a fantastic tool that I encourage any developer to add to Edge or Chrome as an extension.

Level up for Dynamics 365/Power Apps Browser extension
Dynamics 365 Power Pane Browser extension.

Dynamics 365 Power Pane is also a useful extension shown below:
Power Pane options

The built in browser Dataverse management tool is super easy to use to model your Common Data Model further.

Sunday 6 September 2020

Working with CDS data structures for non CRM types

Overview:  I am working on a Power Platform solution and I need to use CDS.  Basically, I need to be able to see and edit values within CDS.

Option 1: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) version 18.6 allows connectivity and read-only access.  Here are the instructions.

Option 2XrmToolBox has fantastic tools for Dynamics and Power Apps.  There are a lot of individual tools from various contributors.

Here I am using "Entity Relationship Diagram Creator" to look at the relationships between the CDS entities.