7.3 Model-Driven App Charts and Dashboards

Charts and dashboards are how a model-driven app answers "how are we doing?" without leaving Dataverse. The exam tests the designer mechanics, the personal/system distinction, and — most of all — knowing when a native chart or dashboard is enough versus when you reach for Power BI.

The Chart Designer

Every chart is bound to one table and one view: the view supplies the row filter, the chart supplies the aggregation. Open a table's Charts area in the maker portal (or from a view grid, select the chart pane and New chart) to launch the chart designer.

The designer's vocabulary:

• Series (Legend Entries) — the numeric aggregate you plot: Count of records, or Sum/Average/Min/Max of a currency or number column (for example, Sum of Estimated Revenue).
• Categories (Horizontal Axis) — the grouping column: Status, Owner, or a date grouped by month/week/day.
• Chart types — Column, Bar, Line, Pie, Funnel, and Doughnut, plus Tag and Scatter variants. Funnel charts are the classic sales-pipeline shape; doughnut is a pie with a hole that can show a total in the center.

Multi-series charts add a second (or more) series — say, Count of Won Opportunities next to Count of Lost Opportunities by month — and let you render them side by side, stacked, or 100% stacked. A Top X rule (top 5, top 10) or Bottom X trims noisy categories.

Key limits to remember: one table per chart, one view per chart, and date grouping built in (day/week/month/quarter/year). Anything more exotic — multiple tables, calculated measures, drill-through across sources — is Power BI territory.

Personal vs. System Charts and XML

• Personal charts are what end users build from a view grid. They are owned by that user, invisible to others until explicitly shared with users or teams, and can be reassigned.
• System charts are created by makers in the table definition and ship with the app for everyone. Only users with sufficient privileges (System Administrator, System Customizer, or equivalent) create or edit them.

Both kinds can be exported as XML and re-imported — from the charts list, use Export chart / Import chart. At awareness level, know that the XML describes the series, categories, aggregates, and formatting, and that editing it by hand (or in tools like XrmToolBox) is the power-user route for features the visual designer hides, such as some multi-series formatting.

Dashboards

Classic Dataverse dashboards are layout canvases you drop components into. When you create one you pick a layout — 2-, 3-, or 4-column, in single-stream or multi-stream variants:

• Single-stream dashboards emphasize one data stream (one view/list) alongside charts — the typical tier-1 agent wall: one queue of work plus supporting visuals.
• Multi-stream dashboards tile several streams (multiple views from potentially different tables) with charts, giving a broader operational picture.

Components you can place on a classic dashboard:

Interactive dashboards (the legacy "interactive experience" hubs used heavily in customer service) take streams further with real-time visual filtering: clicking a chart segment filters the stream tiles instantly, and streams support queue-style workloads. Know them at awareness level — their purpose (service triage), their stream tiles, and that they are configured separately from classic dashboards.

Dashboards can be personal (user-created and shareable) or system (maker-created in the app, visible per app and per role where the app restricts it). A dashboard can also be added to an app as a page and even set as the app's landing experience.

Embedding Power BI

Two native integrations exist:

1. Power BI tiles on a classic dashboard — a user with a Power BI license pins visuals from their Power BI dashboards into a Dataverse dashboard. The organization's admin must first enable Power BI embedding in the environment's settings (Power Platform admin center > environment > Settings > Features), and tiles respect Power BI security and licensing.
2. Power BI embedded reports/dashboards as full pages — makers can surface an entire Power BI report inside the app, with optional contextual filtering so the report filters to the current record or view.

Chart vs. View vs. Power BI

The exam's favorite decision question:

• View — when the user must work the list: sort, filter, edit inline, run actions on rows. Views are the default working surface.
• Chart — when a quick, in-context aggregate helps: pipeline by stage, cases by priority, counts this month. Fast, native, no extra licensing, but single-table and limited visuals.
• Dashboard — when several charts/lists must be seen together as a landing page.
• Power BI — when you need data from multiple sources, rich/custom visuals, complex measures (DAX), scheduled refresh, or enterprise-wide distribution beyond app users.

Scenario: an operations lead wants "open incidents by severity next to the list of incidents older than 7 days." A multi-stream classic dashboard with a severity column chart and an aged-incidents list answers it natively. If she later wants incident trends joined with finance data from an ERP, that is the Power BI signal.