Developers: Understand terminology in Microsoft Dataverse

Dataverse isn't just a database. It also provides web services that enable developers to interact with data.

If you're familiar with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, you know that architects and developers of data-oriented applications often struggle to achieve two different objectives.

• They must model the entities, relationships, and logic of the business problems they're solving.
• They must also work with the data services that store and retrieve the data.

The Entity Framework enables developers to work with data as domain-specific objects and properties, such as customers and customer addresses. They don't need to worry about the underlying database tables and columns where this data is stored.

In Power Apps and Dataverse, you use tables and columns in the user interface. These terms refer to the general idea of how data is stored in the Dataverse database. However, specific terminology such as entity and attributes refers to the underlying data model and interfaces. Developers use this terminology depending on the protocol or technology used to interact with data.

The data structures that developers work with are exposed as entities. The term is baked into the names of things developers use. For example:

To...	Using...	Developers will...
Create a Dataverse table	Web API	POST an instance of the EntityMetadata EntityType to the /EntityDefinitions resource
Create a Dataverse table	.NET SDK	Create an instance of the EntityMetadata Class and use the CreateEntityRequest Class when using the SDK for .NET.
Create a row or record in a Dataverse table	Web API	POST data defined as a specific EntityType. You can find a list of these EntityTypes here: Web API EntityType Reference
Create a row or record in a Dataverse table	.NET SDK	Create an instance of the Entity Class or a class that inherits from it (Account, Contact, etc.) and use the CreateRequest Class when using the SDK for .NET. A developer can find the information they need to use the Entity class in the entity reference.

Terminology use depending on protocol or technology

The developer documentation uses terminology that depends on the protocol or class library that developers use.

• When you work with the Web API, you use the terminology defined by the OData protocol. Data structures called EntityTypes have properties and navigation properties.

• When you work with the .NET SDK, you use Entity because there's an Entity class. The Entity class has an Attributes property that contains a collection of attributes defined by data in an AttributeMetadata Class and many other classes derived from it.

Use the appropriate terminology to describe the SDK and Web API technology. The developer documentation sometimes uses different terminology than the Power Apps user interface. The following table helps guide you to some of the terminology differences between the developer documentation and the rest of the Power Apps documentation.

Power Apps UI	Dataverse SDK	Dataverse Web API
Table	Entity	EntityType
Column	Attribute	Property
Row	Record	Record
Choices	OptionSet/Picklist	OptionSet
Yes/No	Boolean	Boolean