Inheritance on Entities or Copy Entity

[D365Ideas_Admin]

There are many instances where you have a group of entities which are specializations of a more generic entity.

At the moment this is difficult to model effectively as the choice is to create one entity with a "type" attribute and many fields which are relevant only to the type you choose. This involves lots of form work to show/hide and validate the correct set of fields. However it does have the advantage that it it is easy to create a view showing all of the different types together (although the fact that a user sees the specialized fields when creating a view is confusing).

The other alternative is to create many different entities each with the "base" set of attributes plus the ones that are specific. This makes creating views/relationships/reports very difficult.

Ideally we should be able to create a "base" entity with common attributes on it and then inherit those attributes to the specialized entities.

When creating views/reports it would be good to be able to create a list showing all of the entities together which inherit from the "base" type using the "base" set of attributes. In other words the ability to treat them the same base type for views/reports.

Obviously I realise this is a pretty big change, but it would be a very useful one.

[D365Ideas_Admin]

Thanks for your suggestion. We're already considering this for a future release: http://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/641231/inheritance-on-entities-or-... This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.

[D365Ideas_Admin]

Hi, Thanks for replying so quickly. I did look for another connection entry and saw the one you mentioned, but it didn't sound exactly the same even though they mention inheritance: "I'd like to be able to create a new entity that either inherits the attributes from another entity, or to create a new entity based on a "template" of an entity. For example, we often find ourselves creating new entities similar to contact and account, and it would be so much easier to be able to create the new entity and have it start out with the same attributes/relationships already on the contact/account rather than having to create them from scratch." This key for me is the ability to be able to treat several different entities the same in views/reports etc. by using the attributes inherited from the base entity. I don't just want to copy a set of attributes I want the system to be able to treat all derived entities as if they were the base entity. That said, it's possible I misunderstood what they were asking for. Thanks again. LJ

[ChristopherMank]

Any update on this request? Entity inheritance would save a lot of work across so many Power Apps scenarios.

[joshecube]

This would be super handy for our situation right now. I'm migrating an Django application to Power Apps (web dev was overkill!) and it has inheritance which we are having to rethink. I am currently copying the same fields to all the entities which is a pain. The way inheritance works in Django is nicer, or something like generic relations would be helpful too.