Forum Discussion

JordanImran's avatar
JordanImran
Frequent Visitor
6 years ago

Missing Fields from Common Data Service

Hi,   I noticed when connecting Power BI Desktop to Common Data Service, we have the option to connect to 'Entities' or 'System':   Unfortunately, it seems that Primary Name fields (User, Organis...
General Comment
Need Help
DonalMc's avatar
DonalMc
Advocate II
5 years ago

I came across this post when researching Entity vs System tables.

Re the missing primary name field, I have noticed is that if the primary field has the same name as the entity, it will not appear in the entity table, but will appear in the system table.

 

I am compiling list of differences to better understand the two:

  • Entity tables include option set labels, system tables do not
  • With Entity tables, if the primary name field has the same name as the Entity, it will not display in the entity table, but it will in the system table
  • System tables include the ability to expand related tables and get values from them (this saves you having to do lookups and so on)

 

Often, I find the best thing to do is to connect to both versions of the table and merge them.

Then use Choose Columns to only keep the fields that I really need for now

kstiegler's avatar
kstiegler
Advocate I
5 years ago
DonalMc wrote:

I came across this post when researching Entity vs System tables.

Re the missing primary name field, I have noticed is that if the primary field has the same name as the entity, it will not appear in the entity table, but will appear in the system table

I am encountering this exact situation. We have an entity named "Hours" and a decimal number field on the entity named "psa_hours". We have to use the System table rather than the Entity table in order to obtain the value of this field. 

 

This does seem like a bug.