Earlier this month, Microsoft made a drastic change, and if you’re like me, and normally entry the maker portal utilizing the preview url (make.preview.powerapps.com) to test for upcoming adjustments, you’d have seen a few of the adjustments which I’ll present right now.
Initially, we have now seen a few of these adjustments within the preview of Venture Oakdale, which is the implementation of Energy Apps inside the Microsoft Groups consumer, however weren’t anticipating the identical to occur in our Frequent Knowledge Service environments.
As I’m somewhat late ending this weblog publish, on account of life occurring, I didn’t initially take comparability screenshots between the maker portal and the preview portal, so on the time that I’m scripting this late on November 14th, I can see that these adjustments have already been made to the common maker portal (no less than within the US area), so I made the comparability with the Basic interface.
The primary change that we’re seeing is the change in Entities. Entities which symbolize a enterprise object, corresponding to an account, contact, lead or alternative, will now be referred to as tables, a terminology that’s broadly identified outdoors of the world of Microsoft Dynamics and CDS in lots of database purposes corresponding to Microsoft SQL Server. The picture beneath reveals the distinction between the Make Portal terminology and the Basic interface.
The following change, which might make sense with the change of entities to tables, will in fact be the change of fields and attributes to columns. That is comparable terminology that you’d discover in database purposes and which Microsoft is adopting.
Along with fields and attributes being names as columns, the precise data that we view the info have been modified to rows.
Now, if we’re going to change the identify of fields and attributes to columns, we would as effectively change the info kind naming of a few of these fields (I imply columns). The primary change is Possibility Units. We presently have two kinds of Possibility Units within the Frequent Knowledge Service. We’ve an everyday Possibility Set, which permits the choice of a single worth, and a MultiSelect Possibility Set which permits the choice of a number of values. The “Single Choose” Possibility Set will now be referred to as Alternative, and the MultiSelect Possibility Set will now be referred to as Decisions.
As well as the Two Choices knowledge kind will likely be renamed Sure/No. The picture beneath reveals these adjustments.
After all with the change of Possibility Units to Decisions, the World Possibility Units modified as effectively, and are seen from inside the knowledge space of the maker portal.
Despite the fact that I began working with databases within the mid-90s, and with Microsoft Dynamics CRM since model 3.0, I actually do want the unique names that had been used. There was one thing distinctive about Entities and Attributes, as they don’t seem to be the identical as Tables and Columns in our SQL database or Microsoft Entry. There may be a lot extra that makes up these entities.
With all these adjustments, I ought to talked about that for professional builders there won’t be an adjustments to the mannequin that can have an effect on your code. You’ll nonetheless be utilizing getAttribute in your JavaScript code, or CreateEntityRequest and CreateAttributeRequest within the SDK. Net Api will stay unchanged as effectively (no less than for now).
You could find the Microsoft Docs web page about these terminology updates right here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/common-data-service/data-platform-intro#terminology-updates