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Big Form Several Tables or One Big One

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Here is a high level of what I'm working with:

Build a form with nine total pages
The idea of the form is sort of a build your own adventure
The user fills in the first page by inputting some details, then picking any combination of eight options.
The options selected will dictate what pages are shown to the user
The pages will have some overlap in fields, i.e. Comment, Attachment
Submitted data will eventually land in another system, so Flow will be used to move it

My first idea was to create one core table (form detail) and then another table to handle all the page fields (pages). The pages table will have 50+ columns with roughly 1/4th of the columns overlapping across the pages in the form.

Would you break this out so that each page had its own table or leave it as is?

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ragavanrajan 7,044 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @Anonymous

I think it is alright. Breaking into two tables

1. Form details

2. Pages

are fine.

If you prefer, create a relationship in the form details table and you can have 8 different tables joining through a primary key. The core message here is to make the user interaction smooth. I.e. including retrieval of data. As long as you are not overloading the database is the key takeaway.

Hope it helps.

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Fubar 8,487 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Based on the info provided not sure about multiple tables (think its probably still one), but it sounds like what you are after is probably the Advanced Form (its like a Previous/Next step Wizard) .https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/getting-started/advanced-forms

Also need to differentiate between a DataVerse Form and Portal/Pages Form as you can do things like define a DataVerse Form (or multiple forms) for a particular Table, and then have your Portal/Pages form use the whole form or just 1 tab on the DataVerse form.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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I'm sandboxing with dataverse advanced forms. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Power Pages is an easier way to navigate and use the objects that have been in place for a while, no?

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PaulJSwider 152 on at

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100% not easier that Canvas or Model Driven Forms.

Designing pages and portals effectively require knowing at least four programming languages. .JS, Liquid, Bootstrap, and .NET. There is a WYSIWYG pages designer but it has much to be desired from a designer perspective.

The benefit of Pages and Portals is security, external authentication providers, external users, enterprise process flows, and invitations, not ease of use. This may change in the future but this is the reality today.

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PaulJSwider 152 on at

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@Anonymous I think you posted this in the wrong forum. This group is for Power Apps Portals and Power Pages. Are you asking about Model Driven Custom Pages?

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Discussions/Not-to-be-confused-with-Power-Apps-Custom-Pages/m-p/1598955#M6

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PaulJSwider 152 on at

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You should look into Azure Static Web Sites or Azure Apps.

Power Pages is not the best place to design games. The pages and portals are designed to surface business data from Dataverse and Azure in a secure way. You will pay much more than you need to if you design this using PP.

Good luck!

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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I'll take a look at Azure Static Web Sites or Azure Apps.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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100% working with Power Apps Portal forms n' stuff for public facing interaction.

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Fubar 8,487 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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@Anonymous wrote:
I'm sandboxing with dataverse advanced forms. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Power Pages is an easier way to navigate and use the objects that have been in place for a while, no?
'easier' is a relative term. Power Pages are supposed to be a superset of PowerApps Portals - at the moment the main difference is the designer interface but you can still work in the Portal Management App and achieve the same thing.

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PaulJSwider 152 on at

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Power Apps, D365, and Portals would be GREAT to run your gaming business. You could also use Power Pages for a member portal where gamers could subscribe, get help, manage the account, etc. -- But the game code and UX are better off as a Web App, Container, Node.JS, etc.

There are third-party companies that have platforms for building the kind of app you describe. It is possible to integrate these platforms with Pages and Portals via Web API and third-party APIs. We are doing something similar with Discord. We use Discord for our community portal and Power Portals for our company portal. I'd like to use Power Portals for all of our communities but I'm waiting for better design functionality.

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