Announcing general availability of our new Dataverse experiences on Power Apps
When building apps, data is usually the core of your experience – and Dataverse is a natural solution for Power Apps. Dataverse gives us a huge breadth of features to work with so we’ve been investing in familiar and intuitive experiences for our users, so that they can get the best out of Dataverse.
This week we announce the general availability of our new data focused experiences and we’re excited to give you a tour of the changes here.
Updated list of tables
When diving into tables you often want to see what’s already available or find previously used tables to continue to edit. We’ve updated the list of tables to make it simpler to find what you need with extensive support for filtering, sorting, search and have provided some key pivots on this list.
We’ve also grouped the table commands in familiar ways to make it easy to find the option you’re looking for. The biggest change you’ll notice here is that tables can now be both Opened and Edited. Opening a table will navigate to the table hub and Editing a table will take you to the new full-screen table designer – we’ll have a look at both of these next!
Table hub
When you open a table, you’ll see a hub layout giving you an overview of the table with its properties and grouped links for related table components (like forms, views or columns). You’ll also see the top 10 rows of data for the table with controls to include other columns that already exist. This view lets you simply update data in a spreadsheet-style mode, and just like a spreadsheet you can quickly add new columns here too.
Diving into related table components, like columns, gives you the detail list of those items, with the same powerful sorting, filtering and searching. And to avoid jumping back and forth you can now switch between these lists with a dropdown in the breadcrumb.
Table designer
When you need to dive into the full data set, you can edit the table in a full-screen experience that gives you access to all the data in the table (of course, limited by the security roles you have!). For those that are more familiar with side-pane experiences around the Power Platform, you can also use the left pane in this view to manage which columns appear on the table as you edit.
Create an app quickly
Now that you have found or built your table, it is just one-click away to create a new modern app over that table, whether you’re on the table hub or in the full-screen experience – all you need to do is provide a name for your app and we’ll automate all the steps necessary to create the app, add your table to the sitemap with all forms and views available, and bring you into the modern app designer.
What’s using this table?
Often tables of data support many apps and flows, so to quickly find out what your updates to a table might impact, you can select a command on the table hub to view the list of apps and flows that are Using this table.
There is also a quick way to play or edit the apps and flows you find from this view.
Columns, data types and formats
With this update to tables experiences, we have also focused on columns as they are key to storing meaningful data – the majority of columns created are text, whole number or date/time so these are all readily available in a single-click.
However, we know other data types are key to many scenarios, and those can even have multiple formats. We’ve organized these data types and formats in an easy to work with way, as well as adding search to the menu.
Formats can now be updated after the column is created (switching between formats in the same data type), we have introduced a new format for text types called Rich text that allows you to store and work with rich data in your apps.
Advanced options are hidden by default but if you need to tweak some of this column properties you can expand that section of the panel to access all the other properties that columns support.
Choice columns
Providing users with a set of choices can really improve an app’s data entry experience and ensures that users are picking from a set list of items. We’ve enhanced the management of these column types to make it easy to sort, drag/drop reorder, set colors and get access to all the other properties of the choice, including support for extending out-of-the-box Status Reasons.
Advanced table tools
For those makers that are further along their journey with Power Apps and Dataverse, they are often looking for underlying table and column names for their code or integrations, so we’ve added Tools that will copy these names to the clipboard and allow you to open tabs to the table definition or data query APIs.
When working with the table in a solution you can browse tables in parent solutions of patches, and you can also review/update managed properties for both the table and all the related table components that support managed properties.
