Inserting x related records - model driven app

[donsvensen]

Hi

Hope that someone can help me to solve this.

I have a custom entity called promotion and a one2many relationship to an entity called Promotion2Products which has a relationship to the Product entity.

The customer now wants to be able to add all products with a specific brand or sub category to a promotion.

Should that be done via flow/powerautomate or canvas app or ?

I am using a model drive app now to create promotions and have a grid in the form for a promotion that lists all products in the promotion - and can add one product at a time using a quickcreate form.

Thx in advance

/Erik Svensen

[EricRegnier · Accepted solution]

Hi @donsvensen,

Good question and there are many schools of thought with no right or wrong solution in my opinion.

• If you need to capture the brand or category the promotion relates to then Power Automate makes sense. You can add a lookup field on brand and/or category and have a flow that triggers when that field gets set (on create and update). The only tricky part is you'll need to manage when the brand/category changes. Should you clear existing products and reload? Or keep existing and just add new ones, etc
• If you only need the ability to multi select and search products by brand/category which then associates them to your promotion then an embedded canvas app is a valid an option because model-driven apps doesn't support this out-of-the-box due to the custom N-N relationship (i.e. Promotion2Products) configured. 
• You can use out-of-the-box N-N relationship to map promotions to products which would then allow you to associate/dissociate in bulk (i.e. by brand or category) but the user would to have to filter and select the products. The main disadvantage with out-of-the-box N-N relationship is that you can't have additional fields to the relationship; you're more restricted.
• There are other options such as the following, but the base solution is similar to the ones above, the difference is more on the user experience side.
  Have a command bar button to add products by brand/category. Clicking the button can either open a canvas app (similar to the embedded app) or open quick create on a new entity named something like "Add Product Request". Upon create of "Add Product Request", triggers a flow that would then associate the products based on the request and then close the request by setting the status to complete.

I think these are the top options that come to mind besides taking the custom route.

Hope this helps!

[ben-thompson]

The other solution that Eric doesn't cover is using a PCF component to map the entities https://pcf.gallery/categories#many%20to%20many lists 3 possible options that may be suitable NN Checkboxes, N to N Multiselect and NN Tags

The advantage of using a PCF component is that you don't need to worry about a canvas app everything is done within the subgrid on the Product and Promotion forms and it should work both ways.

[donsvensen · Accepted solution]

thx to @ben-thompson @EricRegnier for getting back and providing valuable solution ideas.

I decided to go with a canvas app and a N:N relationship.

And by using a combination of ForAll and Relate function the result turned out ok

Thx again for the support