I’ve been doing quite a lot of #PowerPages work this quarter leveraging Dataverse’s File and Image column types.
Why are these relatively new features a big deal for portal projects?
For uploads, that might be gathering:
- ID documents for onboarding
- Proof of qualifications for a job application
- Evidence of damage in an insurance claim
For downloads, that might be providing:
- Proof of insurance
- Brochures
- Terms & conditions
- Invoices
- Order forms
- Tickets / Booking confirmations
- Event registrations / agendas
For multimedia, that might be:
- Featured images for blog posts
- Track / album artwork
- Sponsor logos
- Audio / video files
- Event / conference posters
- Staff / speaker photos
What’s awesome about these vs SharePoint documents, Note attachments or even the ‘old fashioned’ Azure Blob integration is that these meet all my criteria:
- The files / images are natively related to our data so benefit from row-level security
- Easy to report on and automate e.g. target and chase up all claims that are missing proof of insurance or all job offers pending a qualification certificate
- Low cost to sore and consume (these column types leverage Azure Blob Storage… all that actually gets stored in Dataverse is metadata about the file / image)
- They’re readily available in liquid for all our custom templating needs (using either the entities object or the Fetch XML tag)
- They require zero setup to integrate
I have a series of articles online / upcoming showing how to leverage these:
- Building branding into your data model (add a logo and branding colours to the Account table)
- Provide custom per-partner branding (leveraging a logo and colours stored on the Account table)
- Retrieve Dataverse Image columns using Liquid and the entities object (coming soon)
- Retrieve Dataverse Image columns using Liquid and FetchXML (coming soon)
…and there will be more to come as I uncover new scenarios! I’ll be sure to link to them here
