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...
Convert a Classic Customized Dynamics 365 Site Map to a Unified Interface App – ReadyXRM
The new Unified Interface provides a faster, easier way to navigate Dynamics 365 and Model-Driven PowerApps. However, there are still many Dynamics 365 implementations that are still using the “classic” web interface. The best practice approach to convert from a classic interface to the new Unified Interface is to create a series of “role based” model-driven apps for specific… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on...
Replacing a Dynamics 365 Dialog with an Embedded Canvas PowerApp
In case you haven’t heard, Dynamics 365 Dialogs have been on the deprecated list for a couple of years now. Dialog Deprecation Announcement Now, remember that “Deprecated” doesn’t mean “Removed”. It means that the particular feature will no longer get any updates or enhancements, but it will generally still be usable. You can still build Dialogs today, and if you continue to use the… Continue...
Building a Multi-Brand Dynamics 365 Portal – ReadyXRM
Overview Sometimes a specific program, product or sub-brand of an organization may require a unique Portal.Provisioning and buying separate Portal subscriptions may potentially be overkill for the particular requirement.The following post describes a method where different branded sections of a portal can be configured using one Portal instance.Multi-Brand Portals I have been often… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Updated Tools to Build and Configure Dynamics 365 Applications – ReadyXRM
Summary 2018 was a busy year for Microsoft as they released many new features and restructured the entire Dynamics 365 platform to run on top of the Common Data Service. Along with these structural changes, Microsoft introduced a new user interface and new “maker” tools to and configure and create a unique line of business applications, aka PowerApps. The great thing is, you… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on...
How to Fix Missing Menus in the Dynamics 365 Unified Interface – ReadyXRM
Summary Some custom entity views and subgrids missing the Menubar in when being added to Model Driven Power Apps in the new Unified Interface.Resolution is to Edit Ribbon and Publish.Following post describes symptoms and resolution steps. Moving to the new Unified Interface If you have been keeping up with the fast pace of updates coming to the Power Platform and Dynamics 365,… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on...
New Dynamics 365 Portal Features – ReadyXRM
Summary Two of the October release features for Dynamics 365 Portals are now generally available; Manage SharePoint Documents Power BI Integration The New Portal Editor is now in a public preview. Details on configuring these features can be found at the Microsoft Docs site: Manage SharePoint Documents Set Up Power BI Integration Manage SharePoint Documents Legacy Adxstudio Portals already… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Cookie Policy Acceptance in Dynamics 365 Portals – ReadyXRM
Summary Cookies are small files that remember settings or other information on websites and portals. Websites from European companies are required to provide a mechanism for visitors to provide consent to use cookies. Implementing Cookie Policy Acceptance in portals is easily achieved by adding a small piece of JavaScript to a portal web template. Cookies Cookies are used in websites and… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Missing Sitemap after Dynamics 365 Update – ReadyXRM
Summary If your Dynamics 365 instance is set to “Application Mode”, when you update to Dynamics 365 v9, you might lose your main Sitemap Navigation menu. The Application mode checkbox is disabled in Dynamics 365 via the user interface or PowerShell commandlets. You can shut off the Application mode via the NEW Power Platform Administration Center. Something is broken… Today one of my… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Dynamics 365 Professionals – Learning Events You Cannot Afford to Miss! – ReadyXRM
“You must never be too busy to take time to sharpen the saw” – Stephen Covey If we look back over the last 365 days, the amount of change to the Dynamics 365 platform is staggering. In the grand scheme of things, it really wasn’t that long ago that we were working with a business software platform call Dynamics CRM that was pre-configured for sales, service and some light… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article on their...
Dynamics 365 Portals – Switching Portal Between Instances – ReadyXRM
Summary By default, there is only one Portal provided per Dynamics 365 Subscription with 5 plan 1 users. It is possible to configure multiple “portals” across different instances within a tenant (sandbox and production) but only one of these portal configurations can be connected to one “active” portal URL at any time. Portal solutions and portal configuration data can be added to… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Portals – Overcoming Entity List Roadblocks with HTML and Liquid – ReadyXRM
Summary Entity Lists are an easily configurable way to show list data on a Dynamics 365 Portal, but lack a couple of key features; Entity Lists do not have the ability to drill down to different records from the view. Cannot dynamically show/hide columns or highlight fields. Sorting requires fields to be displayed on Entity List. Replacing an Entity List with HTML and Liquid Entity lists… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Support Dynamics 365 Community Tools! – ReadyXRM
Imagine for a moment that on your current Dynamics 365 project that you needed to directly edit the RibbonDiffXml file via Notepad to add a button or menu command to a form. How long would it take you? Would you even get it right the first time? What about manually creating a REST query in JavaScript or building a complicated FetchXML query for an SSRS report? If you are a Business… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
How to Create Your First Dynamics 365 SSRS Report – ReadyXRM
Summary SQL Server Reporting Services reports are a viable way to generate information from your Dynamics 365 system. The Dynamics 365 Report Wizard has limitations in terms of the reports that can be created. Creating SSRS Reports does not necessarily require deep development skills. This post outlines the steps to create a simple SSRS report integrated and connected to Dynamics 365… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
Set Up Your Workstation to Create SQL Server Reporting Services Reports for Dynamics 365 Revisited – ReadyXRM
Summary The process to set up a workstation to create SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports for Dynamics 365 involves a lot of steps and causes some confusion. The report authoring tool is Visual Studio, but a full licensed version of Visual Studio is not required. The Dynamics 365 Report Authoring Extensions has been recently updated to address TLS 1.2 requirements of Dynamics 365… Continue Reading Nick Doelman’s...
