Building Solutions with the Microsoft Power Platform

Chapter 4. Getting to Know Microsoft Dataverse

In Chapter 3, we used Power Apps to create a simple app to track our own professional skills. We used an Excel spreadsheet stored in OneDrive for Business to save and keep track of those skills, and our Power App was responsible for reading from and writing to that spreadsheet. We also saw how the approach that we used created forms so that we can see our entries and select from that list. We even saw that we could create new skills and edit existing skills. With that foundation, you can go on to create a lot of other personal apps—but apps that are meant to be shared with others tend to be more complex, particularly in the way that data is saved. That’s where Microsoft Dataverse (among other potential services) comes in.

So what is Microsoft Dataverse? Dataverse is a secure database, but like everything else in the Power Platform, it’s designed to take away a lot of the complexity behind setting up a proper database. It allows you to create tables of information, and you can define relationships between those tables. Dataverse will also help you out by creating a series of common standard columns as part of your tables, like Created By, Created On, Modified By, Status, and more. The benefit of this is that you’ll have columns that you can use for auditing and reporting; these columns are often overlooked by new users, so you won’t have to worry about circling back to add them in if you forgot a few.

As we saw in Figure 2-7, Dataverse ...