What is a Progressive Web App?
Around 10 years ago, there was an famous ad campaign for a mobile phone company with the catch-phrase “There is an app for that”. The concept was that for many tasks, activities or even games that were traditionally paper or full computer based could now be expressed as “apps” that could be run on mobile devices. To create a mobile app, developers would need to learn and understand the… Continue Reading...
Power Apps portals: What’s new
If you have been paying attention to the Microsoft Power Platform release plans, watched sessions at Ignite as well as read Microsoft’s official Power Platform blog, you will have seen a whole series of new Power Apps portals features either released to general availability or preview in the past few months. Side note: Trading in the MVP badge for the blue badge Before I dive into… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Power Apps Portals – Did you remember to lock the door?
The internet lit up a bit yesterday as UpGuard posted an article on how Microsoft Power Apps default permissions “exposed millions”. The article can be found by clicking here. The Power Platform community is also responding, see excellent articles on this topic from Danish and George Is this something you should panic about? If you follow best practices and have been diligent in… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Power Automate “Fix the Trigger” Issue (and how to fix)
The other day I deployed an update to a Power Automate flow from my development system to my production on a small project. This particular flow ran perfectly fine for many weeks, but suddenly stopped working. On further inspection, I was getting the following issue; There’s a problem with the flow’s trigger. Fix the trigger. As I mentioned, the flow had been working fine. I… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Using Multi-table lookups (polymorphic relationships) in Microsoft Dataverse
A new feature landed in preview last week which is something that has been a big ask of Microsoft for many years, multi-table lookups, otherwise known as polymorphic relationships. What are polymorphic relationships and how can they help you? A polymorphic relationship lookup allows you to specify more than one type of Dataverse table to relate to. A prime example that has been in use… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Power Apps portal WebAPI – creating a record with lookups
One of the features of Power Apps portals that I have been impatiently waiting for is the Power Apps portals WebAPI. This new feature recently became generally available, and it allows portal makers and developers to greatly extend their portal web applications without needing to resort to complex or costly workarounds. Even if you are not a hardcore developer, but comfortable with a… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Secrets of the Dataverse: The Report Wizard
Anyone who has been working with Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 at some point likely tried the Report Wizard. The Report Wizard was introduced in Dynamics CRM v4.0 as a way to quickly create ad-hoc reports. A video version of this blog post can be found on the 365.Training YouTube channel. Reports created using the Report Wizard are not necessary pretty, but can be quite functional and are… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Updating Currency Exchange Rates in Dataverse (including Dynamics 365)
A little know feature of Dataverse is the ability to manage multiple currencies. This is one of the many standard features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 that is also available when building your own Power Apps based on Dataverse. A while back I posted a blog called Guide to Currencies in the Common Data Service (Note that the Common Data Service is now known as Dataverse). When working with… Continue Reading Nick...
Do you use FetchXML Builder? Please consider helping a friend out.
I use the FetchXML Builder on my Power Platform almost on a daily basis. It saves me so much in building SSRS reports, it allows me to build powerful Power Apps portals web templates and it also helps me building Power Automate flow queries. What is FetchXML Builder? It is a tool that is part of the XrmToolBox that allows you to quickly point and click choose tables from Dataverse… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Inject content into Power Apps portals form components
Sometimes even the most simple requests can balloon in extra configuration to meet the client’s vision. One of the most common uses of a Power Apps portal is to collect some information using a form. Adding a form component to a portal page is a very simple exercise. You create the model-driven form in the Power Apps maker portal, and then in the Portal Studio create a page and add the… Continue Reading Nick...
Set Up Your Workstation to Create SSRS Reports for Dataverse, Model-Driven Power Apps and Dynamics 365
Despite all the cool stuff you can do with the Power Platform, one of my most popular blog posts is Set Up Your Workstation to Create SQL Server Reporting Services Reports for Dynamics 365. The post was likely popular because there were different components in the setup process and Microsoft never did a great job explaining all the pieces and steps. Another challenge installing the tools… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Using the Power Apps portals WebAPI to Clear the Portal Cache
If you work with building Power Apps portals, as you make updates to pages, assign users to Web Roles or make any other changes, you want to see these changes immediately on the portal. You are likely very much aware of the Portal studio Browse Website function or the Clear Cache button available in the /_services/about page for administrators. Clearing the cache ensures that all the… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
How to trigger Power Automate flows from Model-Driven Power App Business Process Flows (and get a response!)
I was working on a project the other day and the requirement was for a user of a Model-driven Power App to go through a series of steps to approve an application with a number of data points. I am not the biggest fan of Business Process Flows, (BPFs) but I felt that it did fit this particular use case. Business Process Flow One of the improvements of Business Process Flows in recent… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Power Apps Portals – How to Show the Menu Link for a Restricted Page
As part of a continuing effort to provide more Power Apps portals configuration functionality, Microsoft has recently added the ability to add web page permissions directly in the Portals Studio. You can read about the announcement here: Power Apps portals: Manage page permissions from portals Studio In our endeavor to simplify security management for portals, we are happy to announce a new and improved way to mange web page...
What is the Microsoft Dataverse?
Today Microsoft announced the Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Dataverse for Teams. Check out the announcement here: Reshape the future of work with Microsoft Dataverse for Teams-now generally available Common Data Service, the sophisticated and secure backbone that powers Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, has been renamed to Microsoft Dataverse. This low-code data platform is rapidly changing the way organizations around the world...
Hello Tables, Columns and Choices. Goodbye Entities, Fields and Options. Getting ready for new names in the Power Platform
If you are like me, chances are you have been using the new Power Apps maker portal to create new model-driven Power Apps or to modify Dynamics 365 apps. By default, I like to go to https://make.preview.powerapps.com instead of https://make.powerapps.com as I can see new and upcoming preview features and try them out. If something goes wonky, I always have the option (or choice*) to go back… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
How to setup a Common Data Service Application User (and why)
When you build custom solutions where you need to create, read, update or delete data in the Common Data Service (including Dynamics 365 apps), you don’t necessarily want that application to use specific user credentials to do its work. This used to be a common way for external applications and integrations to authenticate to the Common Data Service (Dynamics 365). A common example would… Continue Reading Nick...
Displaying a Customizable Map on a Power Apps portals Web Page
A popular out-of-the-box feature of Power Apps portals that came from the original Adxstudio product is the ability to display a map on a web page based off of data from an entity list. In order to render the map, you need to configure an entity list to display the map and point data as well as host the entity list on a webpage based on a rewrite page template and not based on a web… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Get Geo Co-ordinates from Address values in Common Data Service Records
This is a reference post for another blog post I am working on. I figured it would be a good as standalone post as well. Power Automate has opened up a whole new world of connectors and APIs that would traditionally have been reserved for professional developers. A great use case for Power Automate calling an external API (application programming interface) is to get the geo coordinates… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
How to Implement a Common Data Service Many-to-Many Field on Canvas Power Apps
This community is absolutely amazing. Huge thanks to MVP Hardit Bhatia, aka The Power Addict. It would have taken me a lot longer to come up with this solution on my own, but Hardit dove in and quickly figured out the solution and also patiently walked me through it. Hopefully this solution helps you out as well! Many-to-Many Fields and Canvas Power Apps I was working with a client on… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
How to Delete your Power Apps Community Plan Environment
If you are like me, the best way to learn is hands on. There are hundreds of Power Platform community content such as blogs, videos, presentations and learning paths. Chances are, your boss or clients won’t be keen on you experimenting using their production environments. A great way to experiment is to use the Power Apps Community Plan. The community plan is a FREE, non-production… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Test Driving the Power Apps Portals Web API
One of the features missing from Power Apps portals (Dynamics 365 Online Portals) since it became an exclusively cloud service is the ability to write a function to create, update, read or delete (CRUD) data in Dataflex Pro (formally known as the Common Data Service, spawn of the Dynamics CRM data layer). You can create and update data on a portal using Entity forms and Web forms, as well… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Power Platform 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan – Power Apps portals edition!
Today the Power Platform Wave 2 Release plan was released and I am sure that there are a dozen blogs providing an overview of the various new features and directions of the Power Platform. …and this blog is another one of them. Let’s dive in. The release plans were pretty light on details around portals, but I hope I can shed some of my opinions on this new info. You can read the Power… Continue Reading Nick...
You likely don’t need Dynamics CRM. You need a Power App.
Summary You don’t necessarily need to buy Dynamics 365 (Dynamics CRM) licenses to get the CRM functionality you need.Power Apps and the Common Data Service have the components to build a simple CRM app that looks and operates *exactly* like Dynamics CRM (without the features that you don’t need) Dynamics 365 is a Power AppDon’t need all that Dynamics 365 functionality? Build a CRM Power… Continue Reading Nick...
Adding a Print Button to a Power Apps Portal Page
Sometimes you just need to print. Adding a print button to a Power Apps Portals page is pretty simple. In the portal studio on the page where you want to add the print button, open up the source code editor. Source Code Editor This will open the source code editor where you can add your own HTML, CSS, Liquid, JavaScript, etc. Paste in the following code: <button… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on their blog...
Low-code method to surface data from the Common Data Service (Dynamics 365) on a public webpage. NOT using a Portal.
In order to be successful with a career in technology, you must constantly be learning. This may involve reading, taking classes or watching videos. Not only about the Power Platform or Dynamics 365 but learning about other technology stacks and methods, and thinking about how to apply them to your projects. One week ago I had no idea what JAMstack is, until I watched this amazing video by… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Convert a CER or P7B SSL certificate to a PFX (For Power Apps Portals or other projects)
The following post is a perfect example of a process that I don’t do very often and when I do, I keep forgetting how to do it. So today I am going to write it down so in the future, I can refer to this post. Maybe you will find it helpful as well. In my case, it relates specifically to Power Apps Portals, but these steps would apply to any project where you need to convert an SSL… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Simple ALM for Power Apps/Dynamics 365 Projects Revisited – Power Apps Build Tools edition
A few months back I wrote a post on how to implement simple PowerShell scripts to export, unpack and import solutions for Dynamics 365 and Power App projects. That post can be found here and is still relevant; Simple ALM for Dynamics 365/CDS Projects Summary All PowerApps/Dynamics 365/CDS projects, big or small should be using some form of source control for customization.You don’t… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Mass Edit Currency Fields in Model-Driven Power Apps (including Dynamics 365)
It wasn’t really my intention to start blogging about currency fields and functionality in Power Apps. If you have been following along, last week I posted about how currency fields work in CDS. If you read my posts primarily for content around Power Apps Portals, then I suggest you check out CRM Tip of the Day, where George Doubinski dug into the portals source code and discovered a… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Guide to Currencies in the Common Data Service
A few years back I wrote a blog post on how currencies worked in Dynamics CRM. This was before the Power Platform and the concept of model-driven Power Apps, but essentially, Dynamics CRM was a model-driven Power App. The question came up recently on a Power Apps forum (Facebook, I think) and I realized there is a new generation of app makers that might not realize that the Common Data… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Power Apps Portals 2020 Release Plan Wave 1: CRUD is coming!
The Power Platform Release plan 2020 wave 1 was released to the general public today and it has some pretty exciting announcements specifically for Power Apps Portals. This blog post is a lot of re-hashing the notes found in the Power Platform Release notes, I have added some extra comments and context that I hope you will find helpful as you discover this new, exciting features! Lets… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Trigger Power Automate flows from Power Apps Portals
Currently the only way to update records from a Power Apps Portals is to create or update data via an Entity Form, Web Form or a companion app. The companion app incurs a certain level of technical debt in terms of development of the app and management of where its hosted, such as an Azure web app or Azure function. Power Automate to the Rescue! The following post outlines the steps I… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Embedding a Canvas App in a Power Apps Portal
The other day I was reading the Microsoft Docs site when I came across an entry on embedding Canvas Power Apps. It is well known that you can embed Canvas Power Apps in Power BI Dashboards, Model-Driven App forms and Microsoft Teams. The docs article also mentioned that you can embed Canvas-based Power Apps in websites. Think about that for a minute. Imagine the power of bring a… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on...
Adding a Power Virtual Agent to a Power Apps Portal
There were a lot of cool announcements at Microsoft Ignite this past week. Notably was the official renaming of Microsoft Flow to Power Automate, PowerApps becoming Power (wait for it) Apps (with a space) and the introduction of UI flows and Power Virtual Agents. Power Virtual Agents are actually another Dynamics 365 feature (Dynamics 365 Customer Service Virtual Agent) that has been… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Simple ALM for Dynamics 365/CDS Projects
Summary All PowerApps/Dynamics 365/CDS projects, big or small should be using some form of source control for customization.You don’t necessarily need to build complicated build pipelines or continuous integrations to implement an ALM process.This post provides instructions on installing tools and setting up some PowerShell scripts to automate some tedious chores when managing Dynamics… Continue Reading Nick...
How to Provision a Dynamics 365 Portal the PowerApps Portal Way
A lot of folks with little to no experience with Dynamics 365 have been creating PowerApps Portals on vanilla CDS instances as a way to create externally PowerApps. What isn’t well known that PowerApps Portals evolved from Dynamics 365 Online Portals and before that, Adxstudio Portals. If you still want to deploy an actual Dynamics 365 Portal such as Customer Self-Service, Partner,… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
How to Revert Back to a Blank PowerApps Portal
If you have been learning and experimenting with PowerApps Portals, eventually it might soon look like a Dog’s Breakfast. You may have added pages, links, lists, forms and you really would rather start over from scratch on fresh new portal. However, you can only provision one portal per CDS environment! Only 1 portal per environment! Of course, one option would be to create a whole… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
PowerApps Portals: How to Hide or Show Content based on Logged in User
For those just starting out configuring PowerApps Portals, the question will eventually come up as to how to show or hide content based on the logged in user. For example, if you are showing a page with registration to a private event or showing user specific data like support cases or invoices. You will want to ensure that this CDS based data is not exposed to the general public. In… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Overview of the PowerApps Portals Management App
When you deploy a PowerApps Portal on your CDS environment, you will notice that a model-driven app called “Portal Management” is also created as part of the provisioning process. This app also appeared when you provisioned a Dynamics 365 Portal. With the new Portal maker experience, you can create web pages, entity lists, entity forms and basic static content. However, to fine tune… Continue Reading Nick...
Create a Power Platform Trial Environment for Learning
Perhaps you want to try out the latest preview features for the Power Platform, or maybe you are preparing for a Microsoft certification exam or even just taking an in-person or online class. In each of these scenarios, you will want to have an actual environment to get your hands dirty. The question was asked recently on the CRMUG MB-200 Study Group webinar on how to get an environment to… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
How to Delete a PowerApps Environment
If you are like me, you have been creating a lot of environments for various projects, proof-of-concepts and experiments. Sooner or later you will hit an instance/capacity issue and will no longer be able to create new or convert to production environments in your Power Platform Tenant. PowerApps Environments The quickest way around this is to do a bit of housekeeping. If you follow… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Configure Azure AD B2C for PowerApps Portals
If you read the Microsoft documenation for PowerApps Portals (and you do read it, right?) it states that the preferred method for user authentication for the PowerApps Portals is Azure AD B2C (Business to Consumer). The big benefits is that it takes a lot of the administration of handling passwords and authentication out of the hands of portal managers and also provides some options when… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
PowerApps Portals Quick Start
PowerApps Portals is now in public preview! Please read the annoucement: PowerApps Portals is now available for Public Preview lt;p>PowerApps Portals is a significant step towards empowering all PowerApps makers to create powerful low-code and responsive websites which allows users external to their organizations to interact with data stored in Common Data Service. Public Preview of PowerApps Portals starts today</p> The true...
Diagnosing Errors in PowerApps Portals
Every so often something weird might happen when a user is navigating a PowerApps Portal (which includes Dynamics 365 Portals). They might get an error message or strange pop-up, some examples; Portal Error This type of error does not really indicate what the issue could be. Another example is an error could appear on a particular entity form page when you submit a record, again, the… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Dynamics 365 Customer Self-Service PowerApps Portals – Creating a Case on Behalf of Another Account
A common question I get about using Dynamics 365 Portals (aka Dynamics 365 Customer Service PowerApps Portal) is the ability to create cases on behalf of other customers or accounts. A typical use case would be if a partner needs to open a support incident on behalf of their customer on the portal. Consider if I bring my widget to a repair shop and the repair shop needs to open a support… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Adding Drill Down Links to PowerApps Portals Forms
This is post is essentially a re-write of a post I wrote 2 years ago called Creating a Drill Down Link on a Dynamics 365 Portal Entity Form”. However, with the upcoming release of PowerApps Portals I thought it might be a good time to re-visit some of the older Dynamics 365 Portals posts and revamp them for the new PowerApps Portals, as it is based on the same technology. The private… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
A Good Reminder of Why the Cloud is Good Thing. – ReadyXRM
I was working on building and testing a Microsoft Flow a month ago. Thursday afternoon, May 2nd, to be exact. It was fairly complex and required a bit of tweaking, most of the runs were taking anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes to run end to end. I was running the latest (and I was hoping final) version, but it was taking longer, 7 minutes, 8 minutes, 15 minutes… then when I refreshed it… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
PowerApp External Stakeholder Access? Introducing PowerApp Portals – ReadyXRM
The Microsoft Power Platform Release Wave 2 Plan was released today and while it’s jammed packed with many new features that will be released in the coming months, one of the features that I am excited about is the arrival of PowerApp Portals. A highly requested feature from Microsoft was the ability to provide the ability for external stakeholders (partners, members, customers, etc)… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
What is the Power Platform? – ReadyXRM
The concept of the Power Platform is just over a year old. However, I find that there are still a lot of clients, consultants and even Microsoft employees that don’t fully grasp just what the Power Platform is and what it can do. Is the Power Platform just Dynamics 365? Isn’t PowerApps a front end for SharePoint? Why would I use Flow over Workflows? I recently added a section… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on...
Reasons to Use the New View Designer for Dynamics 365 and Model Driven PowerApps – ReadyXRM
The new updated view designer to customize and extend Dynamics 365 apps or to build your own model driven Power Apps became generally available (“GA”) this past week. Dynamics 365 and Model Driven PowerApps in their simpliest form are really just a excel list of data (“view”) and the details can be viewed in a form. The view of data can be modified based on business and user… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on...