Select component implementation approaches

  • 5 minutes

Component implementation decisions often come in batches. In this five-minute scenario, decide what fits each requirement before you read the answers.

Scenario: Select implementation approaches for equipment-provisioning components

The equipment-provisioning team brings you four new requirements:

  1. Show the external inventory service's device stock counts as Dataverse rows that appear in views and relate to the Device table, without copying the data into Dataverse. Some coordinators should see only their region's stock.
  2. Store a high-volume stream of device telemetry for later analysis, alongside the core employee, device, request, and allowance tables.
  3. Decide whether request eligibility, which compares an employee's role, tenure, and remaining allowance, should run as fixed rules or through an AI agent.
  4. A new flow combines the custom inventory connector with connectors that handle request and allowance data, but the flow is blocked at run time.

Check your decisions:

  1. A virtual table, if the external system owner confirms that the required row-level restrictions are enforced there. A virtual table makes external data behave like Dataverse rows without storing a copy. Virtual tables are organization-owned and don't support Dataverse row-level security, so confirm how the external system enforces the regional restriction.
  2. An elastic table. It's built for large, spiky, high-throughput data, not for the core four-table model.
  3. Deterministic logic. The check compares clear numeric and status values, so explicit rules give the same, explainable result every time. An agentic approach fits ambiguous or loosely structured input.
  4. Check the approved data-policy classification. Connectors in different data groups can't be combined in the same flow. If the custom inventory connector's classification conflicts with the flow's other connectors, document the impact and ask the policy owner to approve a change or select an allowed implementation.

If any answer surprised you, reread the unit it comes from before the knowledge check.