Power Pages in a day walkthrough
One of the number one questions I get is “how do I getting started with Power Pages”? Of course, being a trainer that delivers Power Pages training, I would normally say to attend one of my classes or one of my sessions. However, everyone’s learning style, requirements, and budget differ. Thankfully there is a lot of learning resources both from the community and from Microsoft. One… Continue Reading Nick...
DocuSign integration with Power Pages
If you have ever needed to sign a contract, agreement, or any other legal binding document, you may have received the document via email from a service called DocuSign, where you can provide an “e-signature” instead of having the physically go somewhere to provide a “wet signature” on a document. In the TV series “The Big Bang Theory”, the character Sheldon Cooper was notorious for creating…...
Copilot for Power Pages Pro-developers!
There seems to be a Copilot popping up everywhere in Microsoft products these days. (I am eagerly waiting for the Notepad Copilot!) The latest Copilot to make an appearance now surfaces in Visual Studio Code (desktop) while editing and configuring a Power Pages website. Writing code for Power Pages has sometimes proven to be a bit tricky because the syntax differs slightly form other… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Copresence for Power Pages design studio
Have you ever been working on a website the same time as a colleague and you accidently overwrote or interfered with each other’s work? Rolling out across the tenants is the new copresence feature for the Power Pages design studio. You’ll get a similar experience as you do when working on Microsoft office documents. You can even directly reach out over email or teams to your colleagues as… Continue Reading Nick...
Edit more in Power Pages using Visual Studio Code for the Web
While using Visual Studio Code (desktop) is a powerful way for pro-developers to extend Power Pages websites, sometimes you need to quickly go into a site and edit some code directly without having to launch Visual Studio Code for desktop, use the PAC CLI to download the latest code, make changes, and re-upload. There has to be a quicker way! Using Visual Studio Code for the web is a… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Build custom HTML forms in Power Pages: Part 2
Last time I showed an example of creating a custom HTML form with the Power Pages WebAPI to create new records in Microsoft Dataverse. This demonstrated a different method of using a fully-customizable HTML form rather than a form component based on a form form a model-driven app. See Build custom HTML forms in Power Pages: Part 1 Prefer video? Here is the YouTube version: This… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Build custom HTML forms in Power Pages
One of the features of Power Pages is the ability to use a model-driven app Dataverse form as a foundation to build create, edit, and read-only forms on Power Pages websites. This feature goes back to the Adxstudio days where the Adxstudio portal product allowed you to use a Dynamics CRM form and surface it on a webpage. While this is a powerful and important feature, its not without its… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
European Power Platform Conference 2023 Recap
Overview The European Power Platform Conference was held in Dublin, Ireland from June 20-23, 2023. The conference brought together the Microsoft Power Platform Communities for 3 days of in-person learning, connections, and inspiration. The conference provided a host of professional development opportunities, which included 3 inspirational keynotes, 6 expert full day tutorials and 90+… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Use Power Platform pipelines with Power Pages
Power Platform Pipelines are a great solution for simple ALM to move your Power Platform solutions from a developer to testing, staging, and production environments. Check out the official documentation on Power Platform pipelines. A few weeks ago I wrote post and video about the new ability (in preview) to add Power Pages websites to solutions. This now makes it a lot easier to move… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Trigger Power Automate flows from Power Pages
At MS Build last week everyone was all “Copilot this and Copilot that…” and the were other announcements that I feel are going to be also very impactful. One of these is the ability to trigger a Power Automate flow from Power Pages and get the results back to that page. I tried this out and WOW! This is going to be a game changer in building powerful Power Pages websites. Check out… Continue Reading Nick...
Use Web Templates as components
While Power Pages provides a variety of components to display data from Dataverse using lists, forms, and even from embedded Power BI reports. There are times when you would want to expand these further and build custom layouts. This is where you can build custom web templates to achieve your unique requirements. Using web templates isn’t a new feature, and I have blogged about using web… Continue Reading Nick...
Use Dataverse virtual tables in Power Pages sites
A common question I have gotten over the years is if it is possible to build a Power Pages that can surface and interact with data that is stored in a different database than Microsoft Dataverse, such as Azure SQL or other databases. Using a different database for Power Pages was not only difficult, but downright impossible in the past. Remember (and repeat) Power Pages runs on Dataverse!… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Using solutions to move Power Pages site configuration
Moving Power Pages (and Power Apps portals) site configuration from a one environment to another used to be a bit of a tedious process. While there were handy tools like the XrmToolBox portal records mover, Power Platform CLI, or the Configuration Data Migration tool, it was always an extra step to move website configuration. Now, in public preview, you are able to add site configuration to… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Using Content Snippets in Power Pages
One feature of Power Pages that doesn’t get a lot of attention is Content Snippets. What is a content snippet? Its really just a piece of text or HTML that you can inject into headers, footers, page copy, or in web templates. You can even include Liquid or JavaScript code in content snippets. A couple of benefits of using content snippets is that you can set the locale of the snippet,… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Using calculated columns in Power Pages
Form and list components in Power Pages are based on model-driven Power App forms and views, which of course are connected natively to Microsoft Dataverse. While it’s very easy to create tables, columns (fields), forms, and views in the Power Pages data workspace, for new (and even established) makers, understanding how the overall data model works takes a bit of practice, and even with all… Continue Reading Nick...
Create a Power Pages webpage completely from within Visual Studio Code
Last week Microsoft released a series of new enhancements to the Power Platform tools for Visual Studio Code that will allow you to create web templates, page templates, web files, content snippets, and web pages. Read the official documentation here. Here is a video where I use Visual Studio Code to create a web page without using the design studio at all. While my example is quite… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Demystifying forms in Power Pages
One of the key features of Power Pages is to allow users to interact directly with information stored in Microsoft Dataverse. Makers can easily create web pages with list and form components to allow site visitors to be able to create, read, update or even delete Dataverse records. However, sometimes new users get a bit tripped up when adding a form of Dataverse data to a webpage, as… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge
Earlier this month I was a judge at the Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge, also referred to as ACDC. When I was originally asked if I wanted to go to ACDC, of course I said yes, AC/DC is one of my favourite bands. However, instead of a Highway to Hell, I took a flight to Oslo (not quite the same ring to it…) From the website: ACDC stands for Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge. It is a… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Microsoft Dataverse information in Power Pages – offline!
Before I dive into the details of this blog, you will notice that in 2022, I only published twice. My day job involves creating content for Microsoft Learn, but I also have a backlog of blog ideas that really don’t fit into Microsoft Learn, so hoping that in 2023 I hope to have a good run of community content on my own personal blog site. Progressive Web Apps and Power Pages One of the… Continue Reading Nick...
Power Apps portals is now Power Pages
My last post from May was all about the preview release of Power Pages. At that time, I explained how Power Pages was the evolution of Power Apps portals. As announced at Ignite today, Power Apps portals is Power Pages. As a Microsoft employee, its not in my best interest to say anything about Microsoft in a negative light, so I won’t talk about Microsoft’s weird addiction to renaming… Continue Reading Nick...
Power Pages
It has been quite a few months since I posted a blog and the main reason is that I have been heads down working with our team on a set of new documentation that relates to one of the big announcements from Microsoft BUILD 2022. Today Microsoft has introduced the fifth pillar of the Power Platform; Power Pages! What are Power Pages? Essentially, Power Pages is a mix of completely… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on...
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...