Guidance on Order Entry/Inventory project

[dowens93]

Hello everyone! 

I just want to preface that I am but a novice with the whole Power Platform. I have built a few simple apps, but nothing to the scale of what I am currently working on. I am looking for a little guidance from you all on how best to proceed from where I am at on the project. 

This project consists of an order entry form using Power Pages. Each customer will have their own separate form with customized fields specifically for them. Currently, each form has it's own separate table. We are also looking to implement an inventory system which will be managed in Power Apps. Currently, I have created the forms using Dataverse tables and they work great. I have also imported their entire inventory as well as quantity of what is in stock into a separate table. 

When a form is submitted, we are looking for it to pull from the inventory quantity automatically after the form is submitted depending on their selection on the form itself. 

Where I am stuck is figuring out how the tables communicate with each other. Since the forms live in their own table, separate from the inventory table, how would I go about building the relationship between the two? The many to many, many to one relationships have never made sense to me in a practical way. I understand them in theory, but actually using them is a completely different story. One potential issue I am seeing is their inventory parts are labeled completely different than their selections on the forms. I am not sure if that makes a difference or not.

If someone could sort of kick me in the right direction, or just tell me I am crazy and this is an unrealistic expectation, I would appreciate it. 

I have attached a flow chart of the project to simply and visually explain my plan. 

If I need to provide any additional information, please let me know. 

Thanks in advance for any help! 

[BenClistBC2]

Kia ora @dowens93,

When you say each customer will have customised fields, how different are they actually from each other? This adds a huge amount of complexity to what would otherwise be a very straightforward process, as well as a significant maintenance overhead.

I would give a lot of consideration to just having one table for these responses, you can still show different columns from that table to different customers. That being said, you don't want to end up with a lot of columns that only have data for one customer and are always blank for others.

 A bit more detail about what you're actually capturing in the forms would really help provide you some assistance.

Ngā mihi,

Ben

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[dowens93]

Hi Ben, 

Thank you for your response! 

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@BenClistBC2 wrote:

Kia ora @dowens93,

When you say each customer will have customised fields, how different are they actually from each other? This adds a huge amount of complexity to what would otherwise be a very straightforward process, as well as a significant maintenance overhead.

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To give a bit more info, the company I am building this for builds custom commercial fleet vehicles for oil and natural gas companies. As it stands right now, they have two customers that they work with. The only difference between the two forms is the customer/contact/fleet information. For example, there is a field for one customer where they fill out the approving maintenance supervisor. That field does not pertain to the other customer and does not need to be present. When the customer gets to the section where they spec out the vehicle, it will be the same on the two forms. I was playing around yesterday with multi step forms, would it be viable to have the customer/contact/fleet information in their own separate tables, and then use multi-step for the vehicle buildout using the same table across both forms?

I would give a lot of consideration to just having one table for these responses, you can still show different columns from that table to different customers. That being said, you don't want to end up with a lot of columns that only have data for one customer and are always blank for others.

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 Touching on this, this is where my ignorance comes into play. I am not sure what the negatives are, if any, to having one big table with specific columns visible across the two forms. I figured it would be ideal to keep them separate, but it sounds like that might not be the best course of action. Since there is data that will never be filled in for both customers, there would indeed be columns that only have data for one customer and blank for the other. 

I hope this help with a little more clarity. Thanks again for the help!