Why are Country and Currency Entities not prepopulated?

[Symira]

Hi,

Just wondering - the common data model which is implemeted through dataverse was created apparently to standardize data and processes in business applications. I am unable to understand, why the common tables like countries and currencies are not prepopulated as in Business Cental. I am also keen to know how you guys handle this situation. Do you populate these tables yourself every time you create a new environment?

Excited to hear your replies!

Regards

-S

[cchannon]

MSFT does not provide that data because then they would be implicitly responsible for keeping it current.

That raises a lot of problems for them, such as:

• dealing with controversial issues, such as, "Do we include Taiwan in the countries list?" If they chose to, Chinese customers would be furious, but if the chose not to, the same would be true of every customer in Taiwan.
• Dealing with changing data: currencies change all the time all over the world, even if you're not aware. Just this year, Cuba killed off the Convertible Cuban Peso (CUC) and China introduced the Digital Yuan. and it was just in 2018 when Swaziland was renamed to Eswatini. MSFT would be crazy to try to keep up with all that change and automatically push it into customer's environments.

[dpoggemann]

Hi @Symira ,

For Countries, many times I will create a custom table for the Countries and load this with the list of Countries, country codes etc. and utilize this in replacement for the Country text field.  Same thing for States / Provinces field as well as this is just a text field as well.  Also for Countries, usually my applications are fairly limited to a minor set of these so we only load what we need but of course you can load all.

For currencies, we would load the data from the ISO list as well.  Keeping the exchange rate up to date is a challenge of course and the data only has a "current" exchange rate, not time based and of course this can change daily.  Overall I have never had to deal with a custom application where we were looking at this to be date specific so we would load the new exchange rates (based on our USD base currency).  Good overview of currency table here:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/data-platform/transaction-currency-currency-ent... 

@cchannon has probably the good reason why this isn't kept up to date in Dataverse.

Hope this helps.  Please accept of answers your question or Like if helps in any way.

Thanks,

Drew

[Symira]

Hi @cchannon ,

Thank you for your reply. Interesting views indeed. Unfortunately though I don't find the reasoning consistant with the policies MS follows for Business Central. The points you mentioned are handled by MS without any problems in that environment. I am sure if it can work in Business Central it can work in Dataverse as well!

[Symira]

Hi @dpoggemann ,

Thanks. In fact we already do that or something similar. I hope though that MS provides either prepopulated tables or a tool to populate them easily. Please refer to my reply above...

Regards

-S