Flow-tastrophe? Conquer Flows with a smile using Flow Execution History
Introduction A common query arises these days: why utilize the Flow Execution History tool when Microsoft provides its own set of debugging tools within the Power Automate portal? The answer lies in a straightforward truth: those acquainted with Microsoft’s user interfaces for debugging are familiar with the challenges they can pose. Often, these interfaces are a work in progress, making the… Continue Reading Dynamics...
Using HTTP Status Codes to Improve Your Custom APIs – Dynamics Ninja
Introduction Custom APIs are becoming increasingly important in Dynamics 365 development. To ensure that they meet the highest standards, it’s important to be able to send appropriate HTTP status codes in response to client requests. Recently, a client asked me if it was possible to send specific HTTP status codes from a Custom API in Dataverse. After some research, I discovered that it is… Continue Reading Dynamics...
Virtual Tables – Custom Ownership
This will be a follow-up post on my session about Virtual Tables at Nordic Summit. People have asked me if there is a blog post about how to set up custom security on SQL Virtual Tables that are available out of the box via the virtual connector. The Problem Virtual Tables are organization owned and that makes them quite limited in real business world scenarios where some… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on their...
Enable in-app notifications easily
Introduction In-app notifications created a lot of hype on release day, but I still see that people struggle to set them up even with the step-by-step guide provided by Microsoft in the docs. Since I hate repetitive tasks I created a simple Javascript snippet for one of my demos that will do everything for you with a simple copy & paste action in the dev tools console of your… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article...
Live Dataverse data in email
Introduction We all know that it’s possible to send static Dataverse data in an email that we send as a notification to the user, but what happens when sent data is not relevant anymore to the user. Data can be changed before the user opens the email with old data and in that case, it’s maybe not helping him at all. We need to figure out how to send live data with an… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article...
Offloading Dataverse Attachments To DMS
Introduction File storage was always an issue when you wanted to store a lot of documents inside your environment in the past. Microsoft was very aware of that so today we have a much better situation since we don’t store files in the database, but in the separate storage used only for files. Some customers still don’t want to store the files inside the Dataverse environment, but… Continue Reading Dynamics...
Debugging PCF in Typescript
I see a lot of people lately started debugging PCFs by using Fiddler Autoresponder which is awesome and it’s definitely a way to do it. If you are still one of those that are not using Fiddler when debugging your controls you should definitely need to read a deep-dive article by Diana Birkelbach which will guide you on how to set up Fiddler for the first time. Debugging with Fiddler… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
PCF Preview Image
Almost every day we see a new control or two developed by the community and available as open source. Controls that are published as open-source are generally developed and published in a really short period of time and lack some of the best practices. My last few posts around PCF were just about that. How to make our controls better by following simple steps? This time the topic is… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
My top 3 features in 2020 Release Wave 1
Finally, the release notes are published and I’m more than happy to go through them. You can find them on the Docs pages below: Power PlatformDynamics 365 After a quick first read, I wanted to make my favorites list and choose the top 3 features that caught my attention in this release. Let’s start with the countdown! 3. Save is always visible in the command bar on edit… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
PCF Localization
Today we have more than 100 open source PCF components and we should really start working on some best practices when developing the controls. The thing I want to point out today is the localization of the PCF components. Your component will be downloaded by people all around the world and let’s assume that there are people that want to use the component in their native… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on...
Power BI Embedder for XrmToolBox
Introduction I can finally announce that my first XrmToolbox tool is publicly available. It’s called Power BI Embedder and it allows you to embed Power BI reports into the forms on your Model-Driven apps. GitHub Repository The idea about the tool popped up in Brussels during the session “XML Hacks – Customisation Tips for Dynamics 365 Solutions” by Marc Gerner where he showed an… Continue Reading Dynamics...
Is your PCF control read-only?
Issue I’ve noticed that most of the PCF controls out there that are available as open-source projects have the same problem. They don’t handle states of the field. The most basic one is the disabled state when the data is read-only. Maybe you thought that framework will handle that by default, but the answer is sadly a big NO. The good news is that you can fix that in no time. Get… Continue Reading Dynamics...
D365 Webhooks – Part 3
Introduction In the last blog of the series, we looked into the structure of webhook response and managed to parse it to the known object that is easy to use. This time we will deep dive into the debugging part. Debugging issue If we think about debugging in the context of webhooks we must have in mind that most of the time we will have both parts located in the cloud. The issue… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article...
D365 Webhooks – Part 2
Introduction Last time we did a configuration of a simple D365 webhook with Azure Functions. This time we will check how to implement sync/async webhooks and upgrade it to parse the data that is passed as the context to the webhook function. If you are not familiar with configuring webhooks you should definitely start with Part 1 of the blog series before reading this one. Async/Sync… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
PCF Time – Gallery Control
I’ve been playing with PCF for last few days and I finally managed to finish my first control. I wanted to make a control that will show thumbnails of image files attached in notes. First thought was to attach it to subgrid, but I forgot that you can’t make subgrid of notes with OOB functionality. This didn’t stop me of trying to make it work so I decided to bind it to the simple… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article...
D365 Webhooks – Part 1
Overview Webhooks are present in Dynamics CE world since version 9.0, end of 2017, but I think that they are not used that much by the people in the community. Why should we start using them? Webhooks is a lightweight HTTP pattern for connecting Web APIs and services with a publish/subscribe model. Microsoft Docs First of all, let’s think about integrations that are done in… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on...
How to embed Forms Pro in Dynamics 365
Introduction It’s been a while since Forms Pro became available as a public preview and I must say that I fell in love with them when I saw them for the first time. From the very first moment, I was thinking how can I use them inside Dynamics 365 interface. There are 3 types of embedded controls for Forms Pro: The first one that got my attention was Pop-up because I thought that… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article...
When smart matching became dumb matching
There are 2 ways of tracking emails in Dynamics 365: folder-level tracking and correlation method. Folder-level tracking will fit only a few cases, but the correlation method will do the job for most cases and it’s a way to go for most customers. When you decide to go correlation route there are also 2 (or even 0) ways to do that. First one is to use tracking token which is the… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on...
D365 Forms – VE vs Embedded Canvas App
A lot of people asked me an opinion on using embedded canvas apps instead of virtual entities to show additional information on the form, so I decided to put those things into the blog post. Both approaches have a bright future and I’m like 100% sure in that because they fit different design scenarios. Let’s discuss the diferences between those two and when to use… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on their...
New CrmSdk force us to use .NET v4.6.2
It’s that time of the year when all older organizations are upgraded to the latest version of Dynamics and with that upgrade tons of new issues are produced as usual. First of all, I have noticed that a lot of async jobs started to fail (not every time) due to 2 errors: System.ServiceModel.CommunicationObjectFaultedException: The communication object,… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on their blog New...
Embedded canvas apps – dynamic D365 context
Introduction Embedded canvas apps are in public preview for a few weeks now and I’ve been quite disappointed because of the context that is passed to them. The context that is passed to canvas app is a static one and it doesn’t display changes that are made on actual records so we need to use the data passed as context to make it dynamic in our app. Canvas app control can be… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on...
Virtual Entities Part 3 – Custom Data Provider
This is the final blog post of the Virtual Entities series and this time I will show you how to create and set up a custom data provider for virtual entities. The first step should be creating a virtual entity in Dynamics. Creating a virtual entity for the custom connector is quite simple and I can say that is even easier than creating it for the OOB connectors. It’s easy because you… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
Virtual Entities Part 2 – Cosmos DB
Here is the second post of the series that will focus on connecting Virtual Entities with Azure Cosmos DB. Last time I covered basic concepts of virtual entities and now it’s time to explore more friendly & flexible OOB connector for Cosmos DB. Last time we jumped straight to the point of creating a new data source in Dynamics 365, but this time we don’t even have a connector… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article...
Virtual Entities Part 1 – OData v4
It’s been a while since virtual entities came out, but I don’t see that people use them on the regular basis. The big question is WHY? I can remember when I tried to make a simple OData example just after the release and it was not possible due to various bugs that were present at the time. Now after almost a year, I thought maybe it’s the right moment to try them again and go for… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article...
Daily async job report with Flow
It’s kinda annoying when you don’t know that something went wrong with background workflows. Last time I used console application that was running on a dedicated server, but it kind died with the end of server subscription. I thought let’s make the same thing, but this time using Flow. The first thing we need to add a schedule component that will run our Flow every day. I think that… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
Web API v8.2 – Bad request when setting lookup
I’m working on lots of v8.2 instances and this issue was one of the most annoying issues I experienced. You want to create or update custom entity (it’s not a problem on OOB ones) with custom value in one of the custom lookup fields. CRM REST Builder will always be my tool number one when it comes to creating Web API requests on Dynamics, but if you try it on v8.2 for the upper… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on...
Change webresource height dynamically | Dynamics Ninja
The feature that I really miss on form designer is that you can set more properties on web resources. One thing that gave me headaches is web resource height. It’s just too small or it can’t be big enough to fill all the needs. I’ve been using small JS snippet to overcome such issues so I can show web resource the way I want. function… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on their blog
Strange whitespace on form | Dynamics Ninja
Today I faced a strange issue that was driving me crazy. I noticed that some entities on the Online instance (v8.2.2) have strange whitespace on the right side of the screen. I couldn’t even find the DOM element that is sitting there in this whitespace. Quick JS fix could be applied to set the width of the left element(actual form) to 100% on form load and everything will work just fine,… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
Change to WordPress.org | Dynamics Ninja
Hi everyone! Since I had some problems when trying to post code snippets on WordPress.com and for me it’s an important thing that I can post code snippets in my posts I decided to set up WordPress.org version of the blog. From now on the blog has a new URL and it can be found on the dynamicsninja.blog. I will keep the old blog up till I change all the links posted around to the new… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
Client API – lookupObjects | Dynamics Ninja
Lately, I’m exploring Client API that came with Dynamics 365 v9.0 and I can tell you that it has a bunch of cool stuff that is not used that frequently by the Dynamics community. My top 3 namespaces are: Xrm.Navigation (alert and confirm dialogs) Xrm.Panel (side panel that makes some integrations look seamless) Xrm.Utility (a bunch of new things) In this post, I will show you one use… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
DeDupe Rules Auto Publisher is available for previous Dynamics versions
Some of the people asked if I can make this solution available for earlier versions of Dynamics. After some struggle when trying to create a v8.1 environment I finally managed to port the solution all the way down Dynamics CRM 2016 or to be more precise to version 8.0. Now you can install the solution on following versions: Dynamics CRM 2016 (v8.0) Dynamics CRM 2016 Update 1… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on...
Error while trying to connect to D365 v9.x via console app
Lately, I noticed that I started to get errors while trying to connect v9.x organizations via console applications that were using OrganizationServiceProxy. Everything was set up just as it was usually working, but with new SDK it seems that it’s not. The code below was just not working with all the right parameters sent to the constructor Here is the error that was popping… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on...
Some emails are not synced to D365
Dynamics 365 and Exchange integration is plug & play with some minor configuration…I just don’t think so. Lately, I had an issue that emails were not syncing to the Dynamics 365 using Exchange server via server-side synchronization. We spent like a month of intense monitoring and changing every single parameter in hope that emails will finally get synced without any issue. Here are… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
CRM Google Maps are available for previous Dynamics versions
Since I found out that it’s possible to revert Dynamics 365 to pre-9.0 releases I made a solution that is compatible with older releases of Dynamics 365. Now you can install the solution on following versions: Dynamics CRM 2016 (v8.0) Dynamics CRM 2016 Update 1 (v.8.1) Dynamics 365 (v8.2+) You can find the solution on releases page on Github as usual. Feel free to report the issues that… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s...
Downgrade v9.0 trial | Dynamics Ninja
I recently discovered that you can downgrade D365 v9.0 to earlier versions like v8.2 or even v8.1. Also, I noticed that others around me didn’t know that it’s possible to do so and few of us had a need to test or develop something on earlier versions of D365. Here are the basic steps how to accomplish that downgrade. Create a new trial D365 instance and go to Administration… Continue Reading Dynamics Ninja’s Article on...