Dataverse and SharePoint Document Management

[Brendan1]

Hi Community!

I've built a few solutions now using a SharePoint list to store photos as part of functionality in a canvas app. While this works well enough, I se Dataverse for the majority of my solution building.  I am interested to explore using SharePoint document management on dataverse tables to achieve the storage and retrieval of photos in a canvas app. I am hoping to do this to eliminate using a Flow to get the images into SharePoint.  I'm struggling to find good documentation on how one would achieve this though.

The use case is simple enough.  One dataverse table record per image, so I can have the image in one field and relevant metadata in other fields.

Has anyone done this before?  What has your experience been.  Would you do it again?

[Brendan1]

You aren't passing in a GUID in FileUpload.Run().  It should look a little more like this:

FileUpload.Run(First(MyTable).mytableid,{file: {contentBytes: Last(Self.Attachments).Value, name: Last(Self.Attachments).Name}})

"First(MyTable).mytableid" represents the ID of the dataverse record you want to associate with your file.

[Brendan1]

@AlexAllach ,

When I approached the same problem, I didn't have any luck with connecting SharePoint as a virtual table.  I also tried using a Dataflow to "sync" the SharePoint data into Dataverse.

The challenge I found (at least when trying to get to SharePoint using Dataflows) is that you can't get access to the files if you connect as a sharepoint list, and you can't get to extra columns if you connect to it as a sharepoint document library.

For your use case, I would do (and have done on other projects) the following:

1) Since your file lands in SharePoint already, leave it there.  Don't try to move it into SharePoint via the Dataverse integration.

2) In your flow:

- Create your new Dataverse record, pulling in all the data from the SharePoint columns

- Create new fields for the SharePoint URL and ID of your file.  Write these into the record in the flow as well

3a) Create a Custom Page that can display your PDF, and call it from the Menu of your Model Driven App as a modal window over top of your Model Driven form, or

3b) Show the SharePoint URL as a URL field on your Model Driven form, and allow your users to click to open it in a new window

If you really needed it embedded in the Model Driven form, you could probably create a canvas app that shows the PDF, and embed that: Add an embedded canvas app on a model-driven form - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

[AlexAllach]

Hi @Brendan1 ,

very funny, I got the same ID this weekend 😉 Basicly I make my own Sharepoint integration, but without any subfolders for each record. So you can easily store PDF etc. in a doc lib and save their URL in dataverse. Thanks for your tip with the file ID, that should be saved, too (to access a file via a flow). Unfortunately using a custom page to view a pdf seems to be impossible, because the component PDF Viewer only works with Custom App, not Custom Page. Thus I will develop a small app that is integrated in a form, in order to preview the pdf. The field with the URL displays a symbol to open the file in a separed tab, that works fine.

Thank you!!! All the best, Alex