Forum Discussion
Custom fields using an external source of data
Hi
We have a scenario whereby an admin team for musical instruments wants to offer different public facing appointments types to requesters.
Some of these appointment types would ask the requester which instrument and subsequently the sub type of that instrument that they need for the appointment during the booking process.
This list of instruments and sub types can change quite often due to the availability of them so the admin team need to have the ability to show and hide different instruments on an ad-hoc basis (For example by setting the status of each instrument to either “inactive or active” and a list being constructed which only shows instruments which have a status of “active” that is then displayed to the requester).
As its an appointment system they want, using MS Bookings makes sense due to all of the out of the box functionality it offers. Plus with the new Power Automate triggers I can push data into a dataverse table to create a model driven app for the Admin staff to use to administer the appointments that come in etc.
However the main sticking point I have is with the ability to keep the instruments and sub types up to date whilst using MS Bookings.
Custom fields seem to be the way to go about it as depending on the service I can ask which instrument the request is linked to but unfortunately custom fields seem to be too static and simple (in that I can’t point a custom field's dropdown list’s datasource to a dataverse table or anything else apart from a set list of values when you first create the custom field)
Would anyone be able to give me any ideas of how to get around this problem?
I’m not sure whether there is a solution that involves other parts of the Microsoft environment, for example inside of the Power Platform environment, MS Forms etc that would either integrate or replace the use of MS Bookings?
Thanks
Phil.