Welcome back for Part 2 of Solutioning. If you missed Part 1 please check it out.
In this week’s discussion on enhancing your Power Platform solutions, we’ll be delving into the process of incorporating existing tables into your solution. Before we dive into the details, it’s essential to recognize that there’s no mystical formula for adding a component to your solution. This reminds me of a valuable lesson imparted by one of my colleagues, especially when discussing governance: “Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.” This principle directly applies to the inclusion of tables in a solution. Simply having the ability to add every field from a table into your solution doesn’t automatically mean it’s the best course of action. Let’s explore this further.
Business Value
In the context of Power Platform solutions, adding an existing object to a table may not seem immediately impactful, but it holds significant value for your business.
Here’s a brief story to help illustrate this:
To better understand the importance of adding only the necessary fields to your table within a Power Platform solution, let me share a personal experience that highlights this point. It relates to that insightful phrase from my colleague. Here’s what happened:
I was working on a Power Platform solution—whether it was an app or a flow—in a development environment, preparing it for the transition to the testing phase. In the early stages of building the solution, I faced a crucial decision when incorporating an existing table into the solution. At that moment, I chose to select the ‘Include all objects’ checkbox without giving it much thought.
Little did I know, I unintentionally created a situation that would require some effort to resolve. As we all understand, time is valuable in business.
In a development environment, it’s not always easy to track who’s working on what, and how changes to a table schema might affect your deployment. Communication isn’t always perfect. To reduce risks and minimize errors, it’s a good practice to take some precautions.
In simple terms, this approach helps to prevent errors, leading to quicker issue resolution. This saves time, money, and the stress of figuring out why you’re encountering errors related to missing dependencies that you didn’t directly modify.
Adding existing table to solution
Within our solution, follow these steps:
- Select “Add Existing.”
- Choose “Table” from the options.
- Pick the specific table you wish to work with.
- Then, click on “Next” to proceed.
5. Now, go ahead and choose “Select objects.”
At this point, you’ll be presented with a list of all the objects that are currently part of the selected table.
- Pick only the objects that you plan to include in your solution.
- Then, click the “Add” button to add the selected objects.
On this screen, you’ll notice a count of the objects you’ve selected.
- Go ahead and click the “Add” button to proceed.
You will now see that you have added your table to the solution
- To view the contents of your table, click on it. (Please note that if there is data in the table, you’ll be able to see all the columns and data. However, these columns are not automatically included in your solution when you move it.)
- Now, choose “Columns,” and you will only see the column or object that you added to the solution.
Thank you for joining us this week. In our next installment, we will continue to explore the world of solutioning. Our ultimate aim in solutioning is to lead into a discussion about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). So, stay tuned for more exciting insights!