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How to Handle Tables with People - Full Name

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Posted on by jrausch

I'm curious what people do as a best practice when creating tables in Dataverse that will contain information about people in terms of what to use as a Primary Name Column.

Ideally, I would do what the Contacts table does - have a read-only Full Name column that is populated with First Name & " " & Last Name, but that's not possible for custom tables.

Is the best option to have First Name and Last Name fields and then use a real-time workflow to populate the Full Name column any time the row is changed? If I go that route, don't I have an issue that the Full Name field could be edited??

Curious how others handle this...

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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Linn Zaw Win 2,996 on at

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If you make the Full Name field read-only on the model-driven app form, the users will not be able to edit it manually.

You can also select that Full Name field as one of the "Record Fields change" in your real-time workflow. In that way, the value will be reset to First Name & " " & Last Name if someone tries to edit that using God Mode from Level Up extension or any server side operations like Web API or cloud flow, etc.

Real-time workflow solution is still not perfect since it shows up x2 entries in the audit history.

Another solution would require a bit of a development effort which is to create a Pre Operation plugin and set the Full Name value in the Target object without calling an additional UpdateRequest.

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jrausch 15 on at

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Hi Linn.

For the option you outlined in your response to this where I create a real-time workflow solution, what would that Solution be within PowerPlatform? I created one as a CloudFlow and it does work, but I just got an invoice for $1,500 from Microsoft because it costs $.60 each time the flow runs. Is there a different thing I should be using to create the 'real-time workflow' that populates the Full Name?

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Fubar 8,361 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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@jrausch note, the response with a suggested solution from Linn was to use a real-time workflow or plugin, these are not Flow . At the time of writing Workflows and Plugins are considered by Microsoft as internal whereas Flow is considered to be making external API calls, internal incurs no additional charges whereas external requires an appropriate license which can vary based on daily api calls (or other qualifying licences).
However, $0.60 is excessive for 1 flow run and would suggest that you have an issue in your flow, or you were not appropriately licensed as there are per flow plans at $15/$150 a month that give 6,000 to 250,000 api calls per day.

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jrausch 15 on at

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Thanks @Fubar .
How do I go about creating a real-time workflow for a Dataverse table? I don't see an option to create one from make.powerapps.com and most of the documentation I find is very old and focused on Dynamics - our app does not use Dynamics, just building on native Dataverse/Powerplatform functionality.

Thanks!

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a33ik 3,306 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@jrausch it's still there in the "maker" experience, just named slightly differently. Open the solution you are working and from it click +New -> Automation -> Process -> Workflow

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Fubar 8,361 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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as per jrausch post above. In Maker interface, select Solutions in the left column menu, then either create a new Solution or use the existing solution named Default (if you are going to move it to another environment later, put it in your own and not the default).

Edit: FYI much of the stuff in Dataverse originated from Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM). Model Driven Apps, Table and Column definitions, forms, business rules, client side JavaScript, workflows, plugins, standard out of the box tables like Contact, Account, Activities, Notes etc - some of the interfaces have been updated others are still the same as they were for Dynamics 365. The main difference is your license may or may not give you full access to some functionality and certain tables or impose other limits like the number of custom tables allowed.

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