People Picker for CDS?

[Brentless]

So just learning more about building PowerApps on CDS.  When I use a Person field, I kind of expected it to automatically render a People Picker (a la SharePoint).  Am I missing something?  Or do you have to custom build your own people lookup and place it into the field?

[ChadVKealey]

I have not tried yet (don't have access to CDS yet), but my guess is you'd use a combo box and connect to Office 365 Users as a data source. 

When you have a Person field in a SharePoint list, it actually uses a combo box and connects it to the SharePoint User Profiles service (as near as I can tell, anyway). 

[v-micsh-msft]

Hi @Brentless,

Please review the following page for the details about how the Person or Group field works in SharePoint:

Person or Group Field details

For Common Data Service for Apps, there is no such mechanism to make it work as the SharePoint side.

See this thread for some additional information:

Where is the people/person field type in CDS2?

The current support field type in Common Data Service for Apps:

Types of fields

Regards,

Michael

[Kevin23]

Assuming you are using the CDS as your data source, the User entity will contain all enabled users of that environment, much like the User List in sharepoint only contains people who have logged on to that site collection at least once. If you want to have a lookup to the User entity, then you can create a Lookup field to the User entity (which will build a N:1 Relationship in the background). 

Unfortunately there is no way in CDS (that I know of) to have it function like a Person field, looking up the User Profile Service or even Azure AD. Maybe it would be possible to create a custom connector to an Azure AD service or use one of the Office 365 services that are available.

[PetarHr · Accepted solution]

Hi All, 

It's an old discussion, but leaving this for future "seekers" - we have the option to use a lookup field on the virtual AAD User table which gives us access to the AAD contacts for our org. 

More details here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/developer/data-platform/aaduser-entity 

Hope that helps another "lost" soul. 🙂