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Dataverse and SharePoint Document Management

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Posted on by erofee

Hi Community!

I've built a few solutions now using a SharePoint list to store photos as part of functionality in a canvas app. While this works well enough, I se Dataverse for the majority of my solution building. I am interested to explore using SharePoint document management on dataverse tables to achieve the storage and retrieval of photos in a canvas app. I am hoping to do this to eliminate using a Flow to get the images into SharePoint. I'm struggling to find good documentation on how one would achieve this though.

The use case is simple enough. One dataverse table record per image, so I can have the image in one field and relevant metadata in other fields.

Has anyone done this before? What has your experience been. Would you do it again?

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @Brendan1,

Although SharePoint is a solid solution for document management, Dataverse supports File and Image type fields/columns to attach documents/images. For the document metadata you can simply add the required fields/columns on the table/entity directly. This may simplify your overall solution a lot and possibly reduce your licensing cost?

If you absolutely need SharePoint, Dataverse integrates with SharePoint out-of-the-box with SharePoint server-side sync. From a user interface perspective it's built-in with model-driven apps, you'll have to build it with canvas app. More info: https://docs.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/set-up-sharepoint-integration and https://docs.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/enable-sharepoint-document-management-specific-entities

Also, in your canvas app, I assume you're using the Attachment control?

Hope this helps!

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erofee 75 on at

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HI@EricRegnier ,

Using SharePoint is actually to reduce my license cost. For a small business where there are only a handful of power apps per app licenses, the DB size has to stay small (a few GBs), but SharePoint in the same environment licensed for a few users gives nearly 2TB of storage! For a image/file intensive solution it's definitely better value.

I do use Dataverse to store some images, but that is primarily for capturing signatures as they are typically very small in file size.

In my canvas apps I use both media capture, attachment control and signature capture. It all depends on what I am building at the time.

Thanks for your advice on where to look next. I will do some testing when a find a spare few hours soon.

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Cool, have a look at the out-of-the-box SharePoint integration links provided and let us know if that helped. Cheers

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narcislascu 3 on at

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Hello,

I am facing the same problem. Did you managed to create the integration?

Thanks

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JohanBE 13 on at

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Hi Brendan1,
I'm trying to biuld something similar.
Use SP to store documents related to Dataverse records.
This al works fine, but for the sake of my life, i can't find out how to retrive these related documents in a power automate flow.

Thanks in advance,
Johan.

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @narcislascu, what error are you getting?

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @JohanBE, document URL are stored in Document Location table in Dataverse. With the List Rows action in Power Automate, you can get the list Document Location related to the desired record/form and then with the SharePoint connecter performed addtional SharePoint actions. More info: https://docs.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/manage-documents-using-sharepoint?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004271

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apper 4 on at

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I'm at the concept stage of my understanding of how the SharePoint integration with Dataverse works. My hurdle is trying to understand how permissions in SPO are handled, are they passed through from Dataverse, or will they have to be managed in SPO separately too? That seems too complicated to be the correct answer?

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jaredbidlow 256 on at

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Well, as far as I can tell, they are not integrated tightly

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @apper, no they are not passed to Dataverse. RBAC/privileges in SharePoint would need to be handled seperately. So even if a user has access to the record and SharePoint link in Dataverse, once redirected to SharePoint he/she will not have access if their access wasn't managed in SP. Cheers

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