Power Apps: Multi-table lookups now available

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Power Apps is a service for developing and using custom business applications/apps that connect to your data and can be used on both the web and mobile devices. It significantly minimises the time and cost normally associated with custom software development.

Multi-table lookups (sometimes referred to as polymorphic lookups) allow you to create a lookup in one table that searches records in several other tables simultaneously. This provides much greater flexibility when retrieving data in your environments.

For example, a use case would be if you wanted to create a lookup to check out media for users. You have a table of books, a table of audio offerings and a table of video offerings. Previously, there was no easy way to create a lookup that retrieves data from all three tables at once, and you might end up with three separate lookups:

• Borrow -> Books
• Borrow -> Audio
• Borrow -> Video

But now you may be looking for both the physical book and the audio book for a particular title. Or for the soundtrack to a film and the film itself. Or when a friend recommends a film to you, and also mentions that the book is great.

Looking up this data in multiple tables requires individual lookups, finding and inserting common IDs into your checkout table, or writing a custom solution.

When searching multiple tables, you can perform a search on two or more tables at the same time and find the record you want from the referenced tables. These searches are all 1:n relationships and work similarly to Dataverse's built-in customer search, where customer searches look for both account and contact.

For more info, see the Microsoft blog.