Payroll Calculation - Which technology shall we use?

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Posted on by EBMRay

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Hello,

I want your suggestions and the most appropriate approach to the technology that we should use to implement the following requirements:

We have around 2500 employees and we plan to build a payroll calculation process on PowerApps model-driven.

Per employee, it will take approximately 12 records to generate his full salary.

So in total 30-40K records will be created when the calculation is over. Not to forget the other GET API operations to check the setup tables etc.. (Huge number of API calls)

I would like to know which product we should extend to handle this process and I thought about the following:

Using Azure Functions or the Console App with Dataverse.

We want to choose wisely as the product should be very stable and we want to avoid any timeout or delay issues during the calculation process.

Your advice and explanation of why we should use it and the pros and cons would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Julien

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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 @Julien2,

Generally for long running and complex processes I tend to use Azure Functions. Haven't used Console Apps in a long time! Can also use Power Automate (PA) or Logic Apps (LA) but if the logic is too complex it might be harder to follow/maintain and might need to split the PA/LAs in child flows. The execution cost might be higher with PAs/LAs as well.

Not directly related but see guideline #2 when I usually choose Functions over Plugins: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Community-Blog/Best-practices-when-customizing-Power-Platform-and-Dataverse/ba-p/1499115

Hope this helps!

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EBMRay 1,710 on at

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Hello ,

It is a very complex process and I think we should proceed with the Azure Durable function. This is because the performance of processing the records and getting data from the Web APIs should be fast. As It should generate the full salary of an employee within one minute.

Things that will delay the process are the Web API calls to check tables setup, validating data, etc.

So we need to find a way to minimize the Web API calls by getting the setup in one shot, store it in a global variable or in an SQL table and during the process of generating the calculation for each employee it will avoid doing each time web api calls.

It is not an easy task since we need to optimize the code in an efficient manner.

Please let me know if you have other things to mention that we should consider.

Thanks for sharing your blog post as it is very helpful and plugins won't work due to the 2min timeout limit
.

Best regards,
Julien

@EricRegnier

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EBMRay 1,710 on at

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Hello @EricRegnier ,

I started working with the Azure function using SQL and noticed that it has a limitation if you query a large dataset of 80MB(approx 2k records) as below;

What could be the workaround to bypass the limitation as the number of CRUDS operations is much more than that?

Can just give me your input on how I would handle it working with pagination?

Awaiting your response.

Best regards,

Julien

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @Julien2, not sure if you resolved this yet but when querying large datasets, you need to used paging. More info on paging: https://learn.microsoft.com/power-apps/developer/data-platform/org-service/page-large-result-sets-with-queryexpression
Hope this helps

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