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Anonymous
Not applicable

Many-to-many Relationship Support?

Hi all,

 

I have a number of many-to-many relationships in CDS, and was wondering if there will be better support for this in PowerApps sometime soon? I've noticed a lack of functionality, especially with filtering using many-to-many. I'll give an example:

 

Let's say I have an entity Smoothies and an entity named Fruits. They are related to each other by a many-to-many relationship, because Smoothies can have multiple Fruits in them, and the Fruits can be in multiple Smoothies.  I have a field in Fruits called "Is Citrus?" which is a two-option field that let me knows if a Fruit is a citrus fruit. 

 

My goal is to be able to return all the Smoothies that have at least one Fruit in them that is a citrus fruit. So I want to Filter all the fruits by 'Is Citrus?' = 'Is Citrus? (Fruits)'.Yes,  then return all the Smoothies for the fruits that meet that filtering criteria.

 

Currently I have found no way to do this filter, and this is one of many examples how many-to-many relationship support is lacking.

 

Does anyone know when support for these relationships will get better?

 

I know that I could create an intersection entity, but since I have >20 many-to-many relationships between different entities I'd rather not waste time setting that up, just for many-to-many support to become better.

 

PS: If anyone knows how to do the filtering in the example above, let me know!

 

Thanks!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

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v-jefferni
Community Support
Community Support

Hi @Anonymous ,

 

Could you please share more details about your scenario? Do you want to filter gallery entity based on some value of option sets in another entity which has N:N relationship with it?

 

As per your description and the example you provided, I’m afraid there is no way to achieve your need.

 

If you want this feature to be added into PowerApps, please suggest an idea on the Idea Forum:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Ideas/idb-p/PowerAppsIdeas

 

Best regards,

Community Support Team _ Jeffer Ni
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it.

Community Support Team _ Jeffer Ni

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it.

View solution in original post

3 REPLIES 3
v-jefferni
Community Support
Community Support

Hi @Anonymous ,

 

Could you please share more details about your scenario? Do you want to filter gallery entity based on some value of option sets in another entity which has N:N relationship with it?

 

As per your description and the example you provided, I’m afraid there is no way to achieve your need.

 

If you want this feature to be added into PowerApps, please suggest an idea on the Idea Forum:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Ideas/idb-p/PowerAppsIdeas

 

Best regards,

Community Support Team _ Jeffer Ni
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it.

Community Support Team _ Jeffer Ni

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it.

Scoozi
Helper I
Helper I

I'm not sure that I am following exactly, but if your trying to filter on two different compound conditions then maybe look into breaking it apart. For example when the screen loads or when the button is clicked etc., you would clear collect to a local collection based on a filter. So something like: Filter(Smoothies, Type = "fruit smoothie"). Then in the gallery you set its connection to that local list you made. When you filter that list by isCitrus now you will have a gallery of only items that are of type fruit smoothie and where isCitrus = true.

 

Hope this helps if not help me understand and I'd love to help if I can! 

Anonymous
Not applicable

@v-jefferni 

You are correct, I want to be able to filter an entity in a gallery by an option set in another many-to-many related entity. I want a gallery to show records in Entity A and is filtered by an option set in Entity B. I will request this feature be added in the PowerApps Idea Forum.

 

@Scoozi 

I've tried breaking it up, but unfortunately that doesn't work for what I want to do. Let me go in more detail.

 

In my gallery I only want smoothies that have a citrus fruit in them. So my gallery should have the smoothies "Orange Pineapple Smoothie" and "Lemon Orange Smoothie" and "Lemon Raspberry Banana Smoothie" because all of those smoothies contain a citrus fruit (orange and lemon.) I know I always want the smoothies with citrus fruits in them. What I don't want in my gallery are the smoothies like "Strawberry Banana Smoothie" or "Mango Pineapple Smoothie" because those smoothies have no citrus fruits in them.

 

Breaking that apart is not so easy. I can get a list of all the fruits that are citrus fruits, but I can't easily filter through that list of fruits to get all of the smoothies associated with each fruit. So I can have my list of citrus fruits that have the Fruit records "Orange" and "Lemon," but I can't seem to easily get my list of 3 smoothies from that fruit list.

 

I found a workaround that I'll describe below, but it's a pain and doesn't work very well.

 

First I turned on the experimental feature "Record scope one-to-many and many-to-many relationships." Then I created a button with the OnSelect property as following code:

 

ClearCollect(SmoothiesCollection);

ForAll(

     Filter([@Fruits], 'Is Citrus?' = 'Is Citrus? (Fruits)'.No),

     Collect(SmoothiesCollection, ThisRecord.Projects)

);

ClearCollect(SmoothiesCollection, Distinct(SmoothiesCollection, 'Smoothie Name'));

 

I then have a gallery that has the Items property set to my collection "SmoothiesCollection."

 

This workaround works, but it's incredibly slow considering I'm dealing with thousands of records. The gallery first loads with all of the smoothies linked to all the citrus fruits, duplicates included, and then shrinks down to the distinct instances of each smoothie so there are no duplicates. I think my only real option is to bring it up on PowerApps Idea Forum. I'll post a link to my Idea Forum post in a reply once I make it.

 

Thanks all!

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