Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi!

The end goal:

My end customer requested me to add a new date field on their Sales Professional form and set its initial value as the date of another, already existing field.

What I've done:

I made a new solution
I made and placed the new field on the form in question. (this apparently created the column?)
I made a business rule which sets the new field's (column's?) value to the value of the existing date field (column?) if it has a value.

The problem:

This worked for seemingly all of the views, which is great, but the column values are empty except for 6 out of some 900 rows.

The end customer has a filtered view that fetches rows that have a date older than a set amount of months. If I now change that filter to point to the new column, no rows are shown even if they should.

The question:

How do I copy the values of column X and paste them into column Y? In other words, how do I set column Y's values to the values of column X?

In the required attachment you will find the table's two columns in question and their values sorted by the new column's (on the right) values from newest to oldest. The two first rows have been manually updated by the customer during this project and the six after that may have been changed by my business rule. I am not sure how these six got updated or if it is just coincidental.

Columns.png

Your file is currently under scan for potential threats. Please wait while we review it for any viruses or malicious content.

Categories:

Building Power Apps

Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

Hi @CU08040934-0,

Business Rules do NOT update existing data in bulk. They only run when:

A record is created
A record is edited in the form UI

That is why:

Only a few rows got values
Existing records stayed empty
Views filtering on the new column return no results

Nothing is broken, this is expected behavior

Various ways to copy values from Column X to Column Y
1) Backfill using Power Automate
Use a one‑time flow to update all existing records.
Steps:

Create a Power Automate flow (manual or scheduled)
List all rows where NewDateColumn is empty
Update each row:

Set NewDateColumn = OldDateColumn
Use new_column_x eq null in the "List rows" action to avoid hitting API limits unnecessarily.

This updates all 900+ records those new columns are empty
After this, views and filters work correctly

2) Power Apps Studio (The "Quick & Dirty" Method)
Power Apps Table Editor:

Open your table in make.powerapps.com.

Click on Data or Edit.

If your dataset is under 2,000 records, you can often Copy/Paste directly into the cells in the "Edit" view, similar to Excel.

This is often faster than building a flow for a one-time 900-record fix.

3) Dataverse Bulk Edit (if simple)

Go to table view
Select records
Use Edit > set value
Limited, not always practical for conditional logic

Keep the Business Rule (for future records)
Business Rule is still useful

It ensures new records get the value automatically
But it is not a backfill solution

Alternate / Better Design Suggestions

If the new column is only for filtering:
Consider calculated columns or views using the original column
If both columns must stay in sync:
Use a real‑time workflow or Power Automate trigger
If this is historical reporting:
Use a one‑time migration script or flow

✅ If this answer helped resolve your issue, please mark it as Accepted so it can help others with the same problem.
👍 Feel free to Like the post if you found it useful.