Mini data packages

Frank Vanhamel
25 mrt 2023
2 minuten om te lezen

Within this blog I will inspire you on Data cards within PowerApps in a way to pass mini data packages. Think of it of entering data throughout MS Teams but where this crucial data is stores and centralized in a horizontal data layer such as MS Dataverse.

Imagine following business case where we want to store some CRM data about a new lead. Being a sales person on a fair and entering first lead data fields. Backoffice or knowledge workers can work upon this data at the moment that this lead has been created by the sales person.

Let's take a close look at how this can be set up. First we will be creating a new Data card starting from MS PowerApps. Click on the New Card button to create a new data card for this purpose.

Think of it as being in the PowerApps Canvas studio and having a litte card in front of you. Our card consists of different component. I've used some text labels for the different data fields.

For the data being entered you can drag and drop the textinput components.

Under the Campaign label is used a dropdown in order to link this newly created leads to a specific campaign.

Finally, a button and the combined Collect function on the OnSelect property will pass the data being input to the dataverse Leads table. Within this Collect function enter first your data source and map the different fields to pass and create the record in Dataverse.

Here's the function: Collect(Leads,{Naam:(textInput1),Email:(textInput2),Campaign:(dropDown1)})

On the right of the screen you can trigger our friend JSON in order to see the JSON code being built automatically based on the data card.

By using the data icon on your left you will be connecting your MS Dataverse table or entity. In our case the leads table. Currently only dataverse is being accepted as possible data source.