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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Apps / Inheritance within the...
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Inheritance within the Common Data Service

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Posted on by NPrice99 1,302

Hi

 

Is Entity inheritance within the Common Data Service available ?

 

ie can I have a base entity and then have a number of other entities which inherit the base entity and then add on their own fields.

 

I have a base entity called Contact, I then want some other entities such as sales managers and sales people which inherit the Contact entity and add in their own fields.

 

I have potentially have 10s or even 100s of such entities which will inherit the contacts Entity.  Trying to maintain these entities would be a nightmare if I cannot inherit off a base entity.

 

Regards

 

Nigel

Categories:
Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps
I have the same question (0)
  • EricRegnier Profile Picture
    EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

    Hi @NigelP,

    Unfortunately inheritance or building a custom entity based on another custom entities is not supported yet. The only inheritance support are activity type of entities: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/common-data-service/activity-entities

     

    You can vote on this existing idea at: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Ideas/Inheritance-on-Entities-or-Copy-Entity/idi-p/215464

     

    For your contact entity, I would strongly recommend not to create custom contacts and/or custom users. For your internal users like sales managers, you should leverage the out-of-the-box User (systemuser) entity. And for customers or external contacts, use the out-of-the-box Contact entity. Perhaps you can add a custom field "Type" which defines the type contact (i.e. customer, supplier, etc). A lot of CDS functionalities are build around contact, account and user which you do not want to limit yourself by not using them. For more info check out this tip: https://crmtipoftheday.com/1302/should-i-recreate-the-account-entity/

  • David Jennaway Profile Picture
    David Jennaway 716 on at

    To add to the previous answer, you can define multiple forms for an entity, and you could use different forms for the different contact types, and hence display different data. 

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