As you learned yesterday, I wanted to learn about PowerApps and decided to do this by improving the game night board game selection process.
As a prerequisite
for this learning experiment I exported our board game library from BoardGameGeek (to be honest, most of this
was my husband's idea and he maintains this list which he exported for me).
Now it's time to get
started with the "easy" bits. I call these easy because these are the
pieces that I already know how to handle. There are a few things we need to
create.
- New "Board Game"
entity with fields to hold:
- Name of the game
- Minimum play time
- Maximum play time
- Average Play time
- Minimum number of players
- Maximum number of players
- Year Published
- Type (Standalone or
expansion)
- New "Rating" entity
with an N:1 link to the "Board Game" entity. This will capture
the date (created on) and an integer score. An argument could be made for
this to be a custom Activity type but in this case I think that would be a
bit of overkill
- New Rollup fields on the
"Board Game" entity to get us the average score for the game
Let's start with a
solution to keep things classy. I also created a publisher so I didn't have
new_ in my screenshots.
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| Publisher Details |
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| Solution Creation |
The solution is
created from settings > Solutions > New. Then I created the publisher by
using the New option from the lookup field. You can also create your Publishers
from Settings > Customizations > Publishers. For more information on Solutions,
check out this CRMUG Webinar: Solution
Management, Your Customization's on the Move.
Alright, let's
create the new Entity. In the solution, click New > Entity. I entered the
details as shown below, saved and published.
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| Board Game Entity Set Up |
I set the ownership
to Organization because all games will be visible to all users with access to
that entity. I made it visible in the sales area and turned off the
Communication and Collaboration features. We may decide to use Notes in the
future but this can be enabled at a later time.
Now for the new
fields. Creating fields can be tedious. There are a few options to speed this
up. We could do the import and create new fields on the way in. This is
generally not recommended as it is very easy to make a mistake. You can also create the fields via XrmToolBox.
In most case, I
would recommend you create the fields manually. Since these fields are simple
and this blog is just for learning and experimentation, that is why I chose to
go the exciting route.
So I launched
XrmToolBox, connected to my trial and navigated to the Attribute Editor (you
may have to download from the plugin store). If you are not familiar with
XrmToolBox, check out: Getting
Started with XrmToolBox.
In the Attribute
editor:
- Click "Refresh
Entities". This will load all the entities from the trial including
the new one we just created.
- Select the "Board
Game" entity and click "Download Template"
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| Download Template from Attribute Editor |
- This creates an Excel file
with the details of all the existing fields. I filled in the details for
my new fields. I did not include the details for the Option Set as that
seemed likely for disaster.
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| Add new fields in the downloaded file |
- Save the updated file
- Back in XrmToolBox, navigate
to the file click the "Upload Template" button. This will show
you the details of the new fields from the file
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| Re-import the field details |
- Click Save and Publish to
push these changes to your D365 environment (or if you are like me: get an
error, see your silly mistake, fix it and retake screenshots so it seems
like you did it right the first time)
Now back in D365, I
see all my new fields and just need to create the final Option Set.
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| Create Option Set |
Ok almost there.
Let's create one more entity in the solution.
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| Create Rating Entity |
Then we can create
the few fields manually.
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| Lookup to Board Game Entity |
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| Score Field |
Now for the fun
stuff! We want a rollup field to give us the average score for this game. So
back in the "Board Game" entity, I created a new "Average
Rating" Rollup field. This will rollup any related "Ratings" to
the "Board Game" as an Average. Later we can decide if we need
additional rollup or calculated fields for other uses.
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| Rollup of Scores from related records |
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| Rollup Details |
Finally, I updated
the main forms for both entities to contain the new fields I created.
If I was doing this
in a real environment, there would be several other things I would do as icing
on the cake. First of all, create a workflow to populate the Name field on the
"Rating" records. I am always irritated to find an entity where the
name field is blank. Then there is nothing visible when doing a lookup, default
Advanced Find views contain no data, etc. So The workflow would just set this
field to the created on date appended with the name of the game it is linked
to. Secondly, I would update the icons of these entities to make them look
pretty.
Now that the entities are created, we can proceed with importing the data tomorrow!
