Designing a Column for Total Revenue from Division's Contracts
Question
A company wants to see the current financial information for every division in one place.
It considers using the existing custom Division table.
The company asks you to help design the new column to store the total revenue from each division's outstanding contracts.
You can find the details of the contracts in the Contracts table that is related to the Division.
What column type would you use in your design?
Answers
Explanations
Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer
A. B. C. D. E.Correct Answer: D
If you want to see the total revenue from each division's outstanding contracts, you need to use the Rollup column type.
Microsoft Dataverse provides special column types for calculations and data aggregation.
These types are Calculation and Rollup.
The Rollup column is similar to the Calculated type.
It operates only with the numeric (Whole Number, Decimal Number, and Currency) and date-time datatypes.
The Rollup type includes columns from the same table and related child tables in a one-to-many relationship.
The list of built-in functions for the Rollup column includes sum, min, max, and count.
Rollup columns are read-only.
By default, the calculations for the Rollup column run once per hour.
Users can change the frequency in Customization settings for the table.
It is an asynchronous operation.
The Calculation column allows users to define a formula based on the column value.
This type includes columns from the same table and related parent table in a many-to-one relationship.
Calculated columns are read-only.
Users benefit from a list of built-in functions for the calculated values and operate on the different data types like text, numeric, and date-time.
The calculations run synchronously when a record is saved.
Option C is incorrect because you need to use the Rollup column for data aggregation but not a Calculated type.
Options A, B, and E are incorrect because the Lookup, Choices, and Decimal number are the data types but not the column types.
For more information about the Dataverse Rollup and Calculated and columns, please visit the below URLs:
Based on the requirement mentioned in the question, the company wants to view the total revenue from each division's outstanding contracts in one place. To achieve this, we need to create a new column in the Division table that will store the total revenue information.
From the available options, we can eliminate "Lookup" and "Choices" column types as they are not suitable for storing calculated values. "Calculation" column type can be used to perform calculations based on other columns' values, but it cannot perform calculations across related tables. So, we can eliminate the option "Calculation" as well.
Now, we are left with two options: "Rollup" and "Decimal number" column types.
"Rollup" column type can be used to perform calculations across related tables. It calculates the sum, average, minimum, maximum, and count of values in the child table that are related to a parent table record. In this case, we can create a rollup column in the Division table that will calculate the total revenue from the related Contracts table.
However, "Rollup" columns have some limitations, such as they can only rollup data from a single table, and they can only use specific types of aggregate functions. So, if we need more flexibility in our calculations, we can choose the "Decimal number" column type.
"Decimal number" column type is a numeric data type that can store decimal values up to a certain precision. It can be used to store calculated values, and it offers more flexibility in terms of calculations compared to the "Rollup" column type.
Therefore, based on the given scenario, we would recommend using the "Decimal number" column type to store the total revenue from each division's outstanding contracts in the Division table.
