A unique app to create and manage family trees – Part 1

Introduction

A very interesting use case came to me for a pre-sales demo for a tribal organization. The requirement - to provide users with the ability to view, create, and maintain a family's history for up to 5 generations in an easy visual manner.

Data Model

The data model was super simple. I created the data model with the following steps:

1. Created a table called Family Member in Dataverse
2. Added a lookup column to the same table and called it Father
3. Added another lookup column to the same table and called it Mother
4. Added another column to upload a picture (optional)

Solution - approach 1

Because there was a requirement to have a visual representation of the family tree, I knew I would need either an embedded canvas app or a custom page. I went with an embedded app as they wanted to embed this in the main form (of the Family Member table).

The embedded canvas app used a bunch of galleries to show the 5 generations and for each father/mother record, if it didn't exist, a button was shown to allow users to create the records.

Here is a quick demo:

Solution - approach 2

Since I really love custom pages, I created a full screen custom page that not allows managing of family trees, but also displays the list of family members first to mimic the family members view in the above demo.

Here is a quick demo of the custom page:

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