Happy 21st December!

The chestnuts are roasting, and the snow is falling (somewhere I’m sure). It’s that festive time of year again, and with it, a new year is beckoning. We all know that the biggest event of 2020 will be the retiring of the ‘classic’ user interface in Power Apps and Dynamics 365. To make sure you are ready for this, my gift is an updated version of Smart Buttons that is fully supported on the Unified Interface. It also includes a new smart button ‘WebHook’ that can be used to call HTTP Triggered Flows.

What are Smart Buttons?

Smart Buttons are a feature I introduced into the Ribbon Workbench a while ago to make it easier to add buttons to the Model Driven App Command Bar without needing to create JavaScript Web resources.

To enable Smart Buttons in your environment, you will need to install the Smart Button Solution and then it will light-up the Smart Buttons area in the Ribbon Workbench. 

There are 4 Smart Buttons at the moment (but you could easily create your own if you wanted!):

• Run Workflow: Create a workflow short cut and then optionally run code when it has finished. Run Workflow can be added to Forms or Grids.
• Run WebHook: Create a button to run a WebHook (such as an HTTP Flow). Run WebHook can be added to Forms or Grids.
• Run Report: Create a report short-cut button on forms.
• Quick JS: Add a quick snippet of JavaScript to run on a button without creating separate web resources. Think of this as the ‘low code’ way of adding Command Buttons!

Quick JS

Megan has used this Smart Button before and asked me if it can support the formContext way of accessing attribute values rather than the deprecated Xrm.Page. Well, the good news is that it now can!

You could add some JavaScript to set a value on the form and then save and close it:

context.getAttribute("dev1_submission_date").setValue(Date());
context.data.entity.save("saveandclose");

In the Ribbon Workbench this is easy to do:

Once you’ve published, you now have a button to run this ‘low code’ on the form:

Literally you could use this for infinite possibilities where you need to make a small change to the form before saving it – just when a user clicks a button. You could even trigger a workflow or a Flow on the change of the value!

Run Workflow

The Run Workflow button has had a makeover too – it now gives much better feedback when running workflows (both sync and async) and you can run some simple JavaScript if there is a problem:

The Workflow that this is running simply updates a field on the record with the current date:

Once you’ve published, this looks like:

You can see that now the grid is automatically refreshed for you too! This button can also be added to forms or subgrids on forms.

Run WebHook

If you have a Flow that is initiated by an HTTP request, you can use this Smart Button to call the Flow on a list of records. Imagine you had a Flow that has a ‘When a HTTP request is received’. You can copy the HTTP Post url and provide the input JSON to receive an id string value of the record it is being run on.

As you can see, this Flow simply updates the account record and then returns OK.

Inside the Ribbon Workbench, you can then add the WebHook smart button:

Notice the Url is pasted in from the Flow definition. Eventually, once Environment Variables have come out of preview, I will update this to receive an environment variable schema name so that you can vary the URL with different deployments. That said, I also hope that this kind of functionality will become supported natively by the Flow integration with Model Driven Apps so that we can programmatically run a Flow from a Command Button in a fully supported way. Until then, once you’ve published you’ll be able to run the flow on multiple records:

Again, once the Flow has been run, the grid is refreshed. This button can also be included on Sub Grids on forms or the form command bar it’s self.

A little bit of DevOps

When I first wrote the Smart Buttons solution, I set it up in Azure DevOps to automatically build and pack into a solution. This made it so much easier when I came to do this update. Doing DevOps right from the beginning really pays dividends later on! You can head over to GitHub to check out the code which is now written entirely in TypeScript and uses gulp and spkl to do the packing (If you are into that kind of thing!).

Well, there you have it – hopefully, this will help you with the move to the UCI if you are already using Smart Buttons, and if you are not then you might find a need for them in your next Demo or when needing to quickly create Command Bar short cuts. If you are upgrading from the old version, it will mostly work with and in-place update, but you will need to add the extra two parameters on the Run Workflow smart button. The easiest would be to remove the old button and re-add it. Oh yes, and the Run Dialog smart button is no longer included because they are not part of the UCI!

>> You can grab the updated Smart Button solution from github too <<

Merry Christmas to one and all! ❤

@ScottDurow

Original Post https://develop1.net/public/post/2019/12/20/smart-buttons-for-the-unified-interface