Edit

Dataverse and Model-Driven Apps Standards and Naming Conventions

  • Article

Note

This is an open-source article with the community providing support for it. For official Microsoft content, see Microsoft 365 documentation.

Note

Effective November 2020:

  • Common Data Service has been renamed to Microsoft Dataverse. Learn more
  • Some terminology in Microsoft Dataverse has been updated. For example, entity is now table and field is now column. Learn more

This article has been updated to reflect the latest terminology.

In any technology or programming language, there are generally accepted better practices when it comes to naming conventions, thinking about data structures, etc. It's no different with the Power Platform. Even if you are the lone person working on a solution, future you will appreciate following some consistent standards. If you are a part of a team, then that team should agree on a set of standards.

This article outlines some suggested approaches to naming conventions and how to think about bringing that consistency to your solutions. Treat it as a set of suggestions which, when followed, will lead to more maintainable and consistent solutions. However, it's also a set of suggestions, so feel free to take this set of suggestions and adapt it for your own use.

Overview

Dataverse

Solution Prefix

The solution prefix helps you identify columns which are custom for your solution.

Entities

Entities are always nouns. Each table has a singular and a plural name.

This is similar to the way you should name Content Types in SharePoint: a Content Type name is singular, the place you store them is plural.

Columns

Columns are attributes of Entities. They describe something about the Table. Examples might include: CustomerName, IsConfirmed, or ReceivedOn. Consistency and care in naming columns is important to both give clues about how they should be used as well as a clear way to understand what values they will contain. A column name like a123_ColumnName17 provides no apparent value, whereas a column name like Account: Address 1 does.

Related column logical names should be suffixed with id. As an example, a many-to-one relationship from an table called Measure to an table called Session might be pub_sessionid.

Relationship table names should be renamed to pub_measure_N1_session.

Date Columns

Boolean Columns

Boolean columns are either true or false; yes or no, 1 or 0. They have only two states. Name your boolean columns with a verb, such as IsActive or HasSales.

Model-Driven Apps