Tag Archives: OData Annotations

Dataverse Web API Tip #12: Lookup Property Annotations

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In Dataverse Web API responses, you’ll sometimes see properties named along the lines of _{navigation property name}_value (like _owerid_value). These are lookup properties: system-computed, read-only values that appear on the many side of a many-to-one relationship and hold the primary key of the related record.

Often, you won’t need to touch these lookups, thanks to navigation properties—which are the preferred way to work with relationships. However, the annotations on lookup properties can come in handy even in cases where the lookup values themselves aren’t interesting—particularly when a relationship can point to more than one table (i.e. can point to more than one type of entity, like column types customer and owner).

Suppose your orders table has a SoldTo column of type customer. This column type can hold a reference to either an account entity or a contact entity, allowing an order to be sold to either a company (account) or an individual (contact). Logically, SoldTo is one relationship; but technically, it has two navigation properties, one for the connection to accounts and the other to contacts. For a given order, how do you know what type of entity this relationship points to and so which of the two navigation properties to use?

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Dataverse Web API Tip #10: Formatted Values

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Ever notice that the values a Dataverse Web API call returns aren’t always identical to what a Microsoft Power Apps/Dynamics user would see when viewing the same data in the UI?

For example:

  • In the UI, a Boolean is displayed using configurable “friendly” text like “Allow” or “Disallow”, “Yes” or “No”, “OK” or “Cancel”, etc.—but Web API responses always return Bool values as true or false.
  • Similarly, choices are returned as numeric codes by the Web API while the UI shows their corresponding textual value.
  • For lookup columns, the Web API returns the GUID of the related record while the UI shows its display name.
  • Dates and numbers are displayed nicely formatted in the UI but returned by the API in raw technical form.

Did you know that, thanks to an OData concept known as annotations, you can request that these display values (a.k.a. formatted values) accompany Web API results?

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