Identify entities and fields in Microsoft Dataverse
Entities are used to model and manage business data. When you develop an app, you can use standard entities, custom entities, or both.
Entities
An entity is a set of records that is used to store data, like how a table stores data within a database. Microsoft Dataverse provides standard entities by default. These are designed, in accordance with best practices, to capture the most common concepts and scenarios within an organization. You can also create custom entities that are specific to your organization. Standard and custom entities within Dataverse help provide a secure and cloud-based storage option for your data.
It's important to understand the most important components of an entity, such as fields and relationships, as they are necessary for creating an entity. These components are conceptually somewhat different from what we use in Business Central and there are also some additional components. You'll discover more about this later.
Fields
Fields define the individual data items that can be used to store information in an entity. Create new fields to capture data when existing standard entities don't have fields that meet your requirements. After you create a new field, be sure to include it on the appropriate forms and views for the entity so that they are available in your app.
Relationships
Entity relationships define the ways that entity records can be associated with records from other entities or the same entity. There are two types of entity relationships.
One-to-many relationships: In a one-to-many entity relationship, many referencing (related) entity records can be associated with a single referenced (primary) entity record. The referenced entity record is sometimes referred to as the parent and records of the referencing entity are referred to as children.
Many-to-many relationships: In a many-to-many entity relationship, many entity records can be associated with many other entity records. Records related using a many-to-many relationship can be considered peers and the relationship is reciprocal.
