Better support for many-to-many relationships in canvas apps (Public Preview)

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Business data is relational. Customers, employees, suppliers, shippers, products, and inventory inter-relate through orders and purchase orders. In Common Data Service, these relationships are modeled as one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many relationships.

Makers can walk all of these types of relationships in Common Data Service by using a simple object-dot notation, just as they have previously done with many-to-one relationships. For example, Orders.Employees.Name walks from the Orders entity across a many-to-one relationship to the Employees entity and retrieves the Name field. Conversely, Employees.Orders returns the table of orders that this employee has assigned, and many-to-many relationships are handled in the same manner. In addition, many-to-many relationships aren't based on a lookup field in either entity, so makers can relate and unrelate records by using new functions.