Leverage the Power Platform API to create a Capacity Report
As Solution Architects, we’ve all encountered the question from customers about monitoring the entire platform. While we have various methods to collect data (audit, application insights, system jobs, plugin trace logs, and more), we often find ourselves in a quandary when it comes to storage capacity. In this article, we’ll explore ways to harness these data sources effectively and endeavor… Continue Reading Allan...
2024 Wave 1 Release Highlights: Dynamics 365 & Power Platform’s exciting features
In this blog post, we’re stepping into the dynamic realm of Dynamics & Power Platform’s latest release – the 2024 Wave 1. While I won’t be delving into every nook and cranny, I’ve handpicked a selection of top features that caught my eye. Join me as we explore the power-packed enhancements, revolutionary tools, and game-changing capabilities that define this release. Whether you’re a… Continue...
Getting Started with Power Platform Approvals
Having worked primarily with D365 modules, it is quite common to set up approval systems for specific business cases. In this article, we will focus on the Power Platform’s standard ability to set up an approval system. Definition & Business Scenarios Before getting into the technical solutions, I thought it was essential to look at the approval process itself.Let’s start with two quite… Continue Reading Allan De...
Custom Connector: Extending your Power Apps using Azure Function and OpenAPI – Part One
As I am a big fan of Azure services and in particular Azure Functions, I recently focused my attention on the possibility to create a custom connector from an Azure service. Indeed, the field of possibilities becomes unlimited once you are able to add an abstraction layer between two services with a custom connector to provide Power Platform makers what they need to take their Power Apps to… Continue Reading Allan De...
Write custom telemetry to Application Insights from Dataverse plug-in
If you visit my blog from time to time, you may have noticed that one of my last articles was about the possibility to analyze the log data of your Dataverse environment directly from Application Insight, and therefore you may have implemented this standard integration between your Dataverse and Application Insight environment! However, we’re only talking about the standard Application… Continue Reading Allan De...
Dataverse: Power Automate vs Plug-ins
If you have clicked on this article, it is not only due to this attractive title, but also because you have certainly asked yourself this question or simply because this subject may have come up in a discussion among your colleagues. If it is not for one of these reasons, you may never have had an issue with it, so you’ve come to the right place to save your time!As you can imagine from this… Continue Reading Allan De...
Analyzing your Dataverse environment using Application Insights
Since this year, Microsoft has put forward several new possibilities to add telemetry to all services. The first major change was the new functionality of Monitor, which has been released initially only for Canvas Apps and then also for Models Driven Apps and results in a screen displaying in real time all events performed from a user’s session in order to diagnose a problem. There was also… Continue Reading Allan De...
Bringing your Dataverse data to Azure Synapse
Often when we set up a Business Application based on a Dataverse database, we are asked to make data available for reporting purposes or simply to feed a third-party database that will be consumed later.We could imagine at first to build an interface to send the data and no matter the target system, but this requires a certain architecture and integration complexity: we would have to replicate… Continue Reading Allan De...
Custom Virtual Tables: Perform CRUD operations to another system
When it comes to interfacing with another system, the possibilities are numerous and depend on many characteristics of the system, but also on performance, integration model, data, security, functional objectives, etc.We won’t go into detail about all this, but we will focus on a brand-new feature, in fact we prefer to talk about an improvement of a feature that has existed for a while:… Continue Reading Allan De...
Implementing Dataverse Custom APIs (a.k.a new Custom Actions)
It’s been a while since we heard Microsoft’s desire to make Custom Actions and Workflows obsolete. For Workflows this seems to be quite logic since the availability of Power Automate and even if they are not synchronous we can always find a workaround by creating a plug-in. For Custom Actions this was more problematic because in this case not all scenarios can be replaced, for example if we… Continue Reading Allan De...
Error handling model in Power Automate
Since the Power Automates were announced and their use democratized, especially with the concept of citizen developer, they are now an integral part of our daily developer/customizer life. As it is now strongly recommended to use Flows rather than classic Workflows (Dataverse), it is imperative to be familiar with them!As we know, there are many Trigger for these Flows (Scheduled, Automated,… Continue Reading Allan De...
Extending Common Data Service using Azure Function – Part 2: Outgoing scenario
If you have already been able to read the first blog post in this series, you now know why and when to use an Azure Function. If not, I strongly encourage you to read it: Episode 1: Extending Common Data Service using Azure Function – Part 1The aim of this post is to put this concept into practice by implementing both an outgoing and an incoming transaction. To do this, we will first define… Continue Reading Allan De...
Extending Common Data Service using Azure Function – Part 1
If you are reading this post, you should already have an idea what an Azure Function is and why this Azure component is extremely useful within the Power Platform. If you don’t, don’t worry, I’ll try to explain it all. Note that this kind of component is also very often used when we want to build interfaces between different systems. What is an Azure Function? To define and explain… Continue Reading Allan De...
How to implement a multilingual Canvas App?
Since Canvas Apps have been around for a long time, and especially since their usefulness for answering simple business use cases has been proven, they do not have language management implemented OOB. When we look at model-driven apps and what they allow us to do to translate the application, we are still a little bit dreamy to have the same functionality within Canvas Apps. The purpose of… Continue Reading Allan De...
Deep dive into Power Apps Component Framework – Part 4 : Walkthrough to create your first PCF (based on a field)!
In this new episode, we will simply build step by step a PCF bound to a field! Before continuing to read this article, I advise you to read the four latest articles: Prelude : Getting started with PowerApps Component Framework Episode 1: First Steps! Episode 2: Focus on … Control Manifest file! Episode 3: Focus on … Architecture & Component’s life cycle! The objective will therefore to… Continue Reading...
Deep dive into Power Apps Component Framework – Part 3 : Focus on … Architecture & Component’s life cycle!
In this new episode, we will go into a little more detail on the design of a component. Before continuing to read this article, I advise you to read the three previous ones: Prelude : Getting started with PowerApps Component Framework Episode 1: First Steps! Episode 2: Focus on … Control Manifest file! The objective will therefore be to study the functioning and life cycle of the… Continue Reading Allan De Castro’s...
Dynamics Power! Paris 365
On November 22nd, the first French event of Dynamics Power! 365 Paris took place! During this event a multitude of speakers were able to make the trip, which surprised me because it must be acknowledged that the community in France is not very developed! About that, I launched a group around the Power Platform in Paris where we meet informally to discuss, you can join us on MeetUp and
Deep dive into Power Apps Component Framework – Part 2 : Focus on … Control Manifest file!
In the article in episode 1, I described the approach I used to design a component and started talking about the different elements that make up it up.In episode 2, we will describe more precisely the architecture of the components. Generating the project The first step, to go into a little more detail about these components, is to generate a project.To do this, and after following my… Continue Reading Allan De Castro’s...
Deep dive into Power Apps Component Framework – Part 1 : First Steps!
Following the writing of a first article explaining the notions of “Component” (see Getting started with the PowerApps Component Framework (aka Goodbye Web Resource)) and the publication of a new component (see BusinessProcessFlowViewer), it seemed logical to me to detail a little more my work. In the first episode of this series, we’ll start going deeper into the Power Apps Component… Continue Reading Allan De...
Send and Generate PDF from Quote
Have you ever been confronted to this question from your client: is it possible to directly send a PDF file of the quote I just created ? It is precisely through this type of automation that implementing a CRM system allows sales representatives to focus on their real added value, namely consulting and customer knowledge. No sales representatives want to waste time generating a document and… Continue Reading Allan De...
Create a simple API with Flow to interact with CDS!
In this article, we will highlight one of the Flow connectors that can be useful to solve “simple” external connection problems. Whenever an information system is implemented, the question of interfaces arises. How many flows to create/maintain, what types of external systems must interact with the new application etc… Although many solutions exist (ETL, ESB…) to answer these problems, I have… Continue...
Getting started with Power Apps Component Framework (a.k.a. Goodbye Web Resources) !
After delivering the new “Microsoft Power Platform” and then the “Power Apps”, Microsoft wants to allow third-party developers to create attractive visual components in PowerApps using the same framework that is used by the Microsoft team. Introduction The first component concept was introduced in 2016 with a set of optimized mobile controls. Custom Controls After the release of… Continue Reading Allan De...
Using special Dynamics CRM date operators in Flow!
Using the fantastic Advanced Find feature, we are able to use some useful operators to save your time like : InFiscalYear, Last7Days…These operators are named “Query functions” and can be used as a filter criteria in a query.You can find the full list here : Web API Query Function Reference. Imagine a scenario where you want to retrieve records created on the last 3 days! Basically, if you… Continue...