Tuesday 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 6

SharePoint Data Modeling: From Requirements to Usage

Paul Papanek Stork

Don't Pa..Panic Consulting, Owner

Data modeling is an essential first step in any Power Apps or Power Automate project. Power apps provides a user interface for information stored in a data source and Power Automate creates workflows that manipulate data stored in a data source based on specific events or triggers. Data modeling is difficult enough for professional developers, but it is even harder for citizen developers.

Citizen developers usually have little exposure to concepts like data normalization and often can’t use true relational databases like SQL or Dataverse because of the cost of Premium licensing. So, they are left trying to figure out how to build their flows or apps using data stored in SharePoint lists or Excel spreadsheets.

In this workshop I will show you some real-world techniques for doing data modeling. I’ll start with a typical project requirements definition and show you how to easily convert it into an Entity Relationship model. Next, I’ll show you how to map that Entity Relationship model onto a set of SharePoint lists. Once I have the lists designed, I’ll show you how to use them in a Power App and a flow.

Along the way I’ll walk you through what you need to know about using SharePoint as a data source, including:

• What Column types work well and which ones to avoid
• When to use (or not use) Lookup columns to create relationships between lists
• How to plan for Security in SharePoint
• Other Common issues

I’ll focus on SharePoint in the workshop but the techniques I teach you are also applicable for other data sources like Excel, SQL or even Dataverse.