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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Apps / Dataflows - Refresh be...
Power Apps
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Dataflows - Refresh behavior

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Posted on by 278

I'm implementing my frist solution with a MS dataflow. At it's core it is just uploading excel data to a dataverse table.
I'm confused by the MS documentation how the refresh works because of my own observations.

LimeLeaf_0-1629896230629.png

(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/transform-model/dataflows/dataflows-understand-optimize-refresh)


As i understand the documentation as posted above the dataflow is first deleting all elements in my dataverse table and then reloading everything out of my datasource. 

But my observation is that the dataflow is just changing my datasets in the targeted table i can check this by the fields "created on" and "changed on". 

Another observation is that records that I created in the targeted table directly in the dataverse are somehow not affected by the dataflow. It is just refreshing the data that it part of the source list.

I feel like totally missunderstanding something here, can somone clear my mind? 🙂 

I have the same question (0)
  • Verified answer
    v-xiaochen-msft Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    Hi @LimeLeaf ,

     

    At my knowledge, Data flow can migrate the data of a data source to the dataverse.

    If you do not set the alternate key, then the data flow will add all the data in the original data source to the dataverse table.(If you do not use power query to modify your output)

     

    If you set an alternate key, then dataflow will check whether the item exists in your dataverse table.If it exists, this item will be modified, if it does not exist, a new item will be added.

     

    In addition, if you want to have the data in your entity always synchronized with the data from the source system, you couldset the alternate key and turn on this option.

    vxiaochenmsft_0-1629941574342.png

     

    Best Regards,

    Wearsky

     

     

  • LimeLeaf Profile Picture
    278 on at

    Thanks for the explanation @v-xiaochen-msft, really helped to better understand the whole thing. 


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