Dataverse Activity Tables

Dataverse Activity Tables

Happy New Year, folks . I hope you all had a fantastic holiday and enjoyed some quality family time.

Jumping into 2025, I’ve recently been using a lot of the standard Dataverse Activity tables and figured I’d do a little blog post about it. Keeping it short and sweet today.


Dataverse Out of the Box

Often when Power Platform Dataverse is not used as a data source for a solution, standard out-of-the-box Dataverse functionality sometimes flies under the radar. The common introduction to Power Platform is through Canvas apps using SharePoint. Although this can be cost-effective for certain projects, there is so much more to Power Platform than just apps. That’s where we dive into some out-of-the-box Dataverse tables, specifically the standard Activity tables functionality.

When you spin up a new Dataverse enabled Power Platform environment, a variety of standard preconfigured tables come along with the environment instance. Common tables such as the Accounts table, Contact table, and various other tables you may see in a Dynamics 365 app can be utilised in Power Platform solutions using a Power Apps license. Today, I’m exploring some standard activity tables.

Shedding Light on Dataverse Activity Tables

A Dataverse enabled instance comes with a variety of activity tables. Activity tables are tables that hold task-related records associated with an account and/or contact. Some common activity tables include Appointment, Email, Invite, Phone Call, and Fax. All standard Dataverse tables are not D365 exclusive! These tables are associated with a Customer (a consolidated table of accounts and contacts) through the Regarding field. Users can create activities linked to a customer and assign the activity to other users in the solution. If I create a task activity for an account, I can assign it to another person in my team. When I open that account’s record in my app, I can also see the task in the account’s timeline.

Timeline Control

Within a Model-Driven app, developers can add a timeline control to a page. The Timeline control consolidates the aforementioned activity tables as well as the notes tables into a single sequential timeline for users to see. This allows for us to glance over account and contact activity when interacting with a record. When adding a Timeline control to your app, you can also disable Activity tables you don’t need in your solution and can configure how you would like users to engage with the control. You can configure the sort order of activities, how you want the layout to look, how many activities you would like to show, and you can even adjust the controls filter options. My personal favourite is the feature that lets you know what you have missed. It’s great for summarising missed activities.

Account-Contact Activity Association

Another great feature about activity tables is the ability to auto-associate activities to accounts and contacts based on relationships. This means that if I send an email through the Email activity timeline to my contact Steve Rogers, who is a primary contact for an account called The Avengers, the email activity will reflect in the Timeline control in both The Avengers account record and Steve Rogers contact record.

Not Done Just Yet

Keeping this post short and to the point, you may notice that if you start interacting with your new timeline, some activities may not reflect fully. Activities such as emails, tasks, and appointments require some additional configuration that allows Dataverse to integrate with a users Exchange profile. That’s what I’ll be talking about in my next post.

Until then, I hope you enjoyed this post and found it insightful. If you did, feel free to buy me a coffee to help support me and my blog. Buy me a coffee.

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