Business Rules

Business rules are conditions that are applied onto your data. The Common Data Service allows you to apply these rules on the data directly, allowing you to maintain your business logic at the DATA layer instead of the APP layer. This saves you from having to configure your application with the same rules every time you interact with your data and instead makes it so that whenever you use your data, the logic is consistent.

So regardless of however you access the data - whether it be through Power Apps, Power Automate or even through an external API, the rules always apply.

Uses of business rules

A common example is when your data is used by different types of Power Apps. For both Canvas Apps and Model-driven Apps, you can:

• Set fields in an entity

• Clear field values

• Validate data

• Show error messages

Model-driven Apps support the use of more complex business rules such as:

• Showing specific fields

• Hiding fields

• Enabling fields

• Disabling fields

• Create business recommendations based on intelligence from the data

Example of business rule use

One example of how business rules can be used is by checking if a field Credit Limit is greater than $1,000,000 (Credit Limit > 1000000?). If so, then it changes the VP Approver field to be required.

This affects how the user interacts with the application just like cases where your password may be required, or your app needs extra permissions, etc.