Navigating Dataverse - 2024 Update
In 2021, I wrote a series of blog posts on how to navigate up and down a chain of Dataverse tables
At the time, finding the related parent or child records was straightforward using dot notation, but finding more distant relatives was do-able but more complicated. Now I’m really pleased to say that Microsoft have made big improvements
Below is the table structure I used in the blog posts at the time, and I’ll use it again now
Identifying Parent & GrandParent Records
Let’s first look at navigating up a series of related tables
To find the Region for a particular County, simply use dot notation to traverse the Lookup column to access the parent table
ThisItem.County_Region.RegionName
You can also easily identify the Country by extending the dot notation a table further
ThisItem.County_Region.Region_Country.CountryName
Even finding the Great-GrandParent isn’t a problem
ThisItem.County_Region.Region_Country.Country_Continent.ContinentName
In fact you can navigate up a relationship chain through as many tables as necessary using dot notation
Identifying Children and Grand-Children
Navgating down a table relationship chain is straightforward too
To identify all child records, for example, all the countries in Europe
Filter(Countries,Country_Continent.ContinentName=”Europe”)
And all the Regions in Europe would be
Filter(Regions,Region_Country.Country_Continent.ContinentName=”Europe”)
But 2 levels is the maximum number of tables that can be reached navigating down a chain
Summary
Microsoft have made Dataverse table navigation a whole lot easier
You can navigate up a relationship chain as many times as required
You can navigate down a relationship chain two levels
Use of dot notation is fully delgable
Thank you Microsoft!