In the Dynamics 365 world, it’s all about efficiently handling the user requests. Whenever you add any user to the environment, the system will update the default personal settings for the user. Maybe you could have some processes in your system which is dependent on the user time zone. So, setting the time zone is very important. It is tedious to update the personal settings manually going to the user profile and updating it manually every time.
Of course, you have a wonderful tool in XrmToolBox from which we will be able to set the User Personal Settings in bulk so that we can update to all the users in one go. What if we want to automate this process, i.e. whenever you add a new user to the Dynamics 365 environment, you want to set that person time zone automatically without any manual intervention.
There you go…this post is for you then…you can do it simply using Plugin or Power Automate. In this blog post, we will see how we can utilize the Plugin as it is more effective approach.
You need to write a Plugin on Associate Message.
Just use this piece of code to set Personal settings…
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Update the personal settings as per your needs in this request. You can find all the attributes of the user settings table by using Fetch Xml Builder easily.
This post is for all who are working on D365 Model Driven Apps and mainly Plugins.
Yes, you saw it right, in this blog post, we will see how can debug plugin without using our favorite plugin profiler which is very widely used from quite some time by everyone working on Plugins for Dynamics 365. All this is done by a tool called Dataverse Browser, which is not yet on XrmToolBox. Please note that there were some limitations as detailed in limitation section below.
Here are 3 simple steps to follow..
Install Dataverse Browser
Attach the Debugger
Run your actual operation.
Step into your code and debug it.
The tool embeds a web browser based on Chromium. It works by translating the Web API requests to SDK requests. Then it analyzes if plugin steps are registered on the message and it loads them, make them run locally. All other requests are sent to the Dataverse, so that the plugins are interacting with the real database.
Download the latest source code of Dataverse browser here.
Next extract the zip file downloaded as highlighted below
Extract the zip file downloaded, open Dataverse.Browser Application as highlighted below.
In the popup window, click on More info as highlighted below…
Then run the application anyway…you will be presented with a window where you can select the environment. Going forward, any time you want to open Dataverse browser, just open the Dataverse.Browser.exe and choose the environment as below.
Click on New, enter the details as above and key in the details.
Enter the settings of your environment:
A name meaningful for you
The host name of your instance (without the https://)
The path to the plugins assembly file (the dll). For a better experience, it should be compiled in debug mode with the pdb file generated.
Then click Go.
You just need to Authenticate to your instance.
Once Authenticated to the respective model driven apps, all the Web API requests sent to Dataverse will be shown as below.
I have following Plugin Libraries registered.
Next step is to choose the instance and perform the respective operation which triggers the Plugin. So, in here, I will perform an update to the Account entity from the Dataverse Browser which triggers the Plugin.
Once an update is performed, a Web API request gets recorded in the Dataverse browser as highlighted below.
Since the Plugin is in Post Operation, i.e. Stage number is 40
Just expand the Patch Request, you should see two operations on 30, 40, but area of interest here is for the Plugin which was registered on stage 40.
Make sure you open the Visual Studio and perform the below steps from Dataverse Browser.
Attach the debugger from Dataverse Browser by clicking on the Plug Symbol as below which will show the list of debugger options available for you to select from. Here I have selected Execute Plugins, plugin will be invoked. You can either select any of the three options as presented below.
1.Do not execute plugins – recommended when you want to debug without actually triggering your plugin logic. i.e. With this approach even you can check the code in Production environment.
2. Execute plugins/Execute plugins with auto break – recommended when you want to debug by triggering your actual plugin, this is recommended in case your plugin code had changed recently and in Development environments.
Just select Ecellors Demo – Microsoft Visual Studio: Visual Studio Professional 2022 version which will launch an existing Visual studio 2022 as below in break mode. Next click on Continue as highlighted below or press Click F5 on your keyboard.
This shows you that the debugger has been attached when you navigate to Dataverse Browser asking you to place your breakpoints.
Now just place breakpoints in your code in Visual Studio. Just go back to Dataverse Browser and click on Ok on the Diaglog box.
Perform the operation which triggers the Plugin from Dataverse Browser itself, this will hit the break point in Visual Studio from where you can debug your plugin.
As you might have observed, your code need not throw exception in order to debug, you could do similarly to the way you would debug using Profiler. But here just that you don’t need to deploy the latest code to the Dataverse just for debugging purpose.
This gives a lot more flexibility eases the way you debug plugins.
Limitions:
There is no support for transactions.
When plugins are triggered because of a server-side operation, they will not be run locally.
For many reasons, behavior will never be perfectly similar to the one when plugins are executed on server side.
Happy debugging, I hope you found this post useful…
Did u ever been asked in your project to update the User Personal Settings….possibly you could have resorted to User Settings Utility in XrmToolBox…may be you could have updated the settings manually for each user in list provided to you…
Do you know you could update them in bulk at one shot in a much easier way, so you don’t need to update it manually one by one. I could see many blog posts talking about updating through this tool, but this was missed in those.
Scenario:
You have newly added users to your Azure Active Directory, now you need to set up the user personal settings for them so see proper time zone in Dynamics.
There were two ways:
Use a view
Choose users from FXB(Fetch XML Builder)
The first approach is easiest of course…
For this, lets create a view Users with Security in user entity as below…you know that you could only update settings for those who were having security role.
Mainly the user need prvReadUserSettings privilege to update the personal settings, the tool doesn’t allow if not.
Once you have connected to the environment, click on Load Users and settings. Now just select the view which have created before…upon selecting the tool will list down all the active users satisfying the view criteria.
All you need is to click on Check all and there by selecting all the users satisfying your filter criteria, change the settings as per your needs on the right-hand side of the tool and click on Update User(s) Settings in one go.
Here I have 3 users in the view, all were updated in one shot…
Isn’t it easy, this trick will save you a lot of time if your user list grows…
In this blog post, let’s see how we can create a custom connector without leaving our own Visual Studio for building a custom connector. Ideally for building any custom connector, we need to create them in https://make.powerapps.com or https://make.powerautomate.com. Last month Microsoft Announced that Power Platform is now a connected service in Visual Studio 2022. In this blog, we will utilize its capability…
Before diving deeper, let’s see what are the prerequisites..
Visual Studio
ASP .NET Web API knowledge
Canvas Apps knowledge
Let’s get started..
Step 1:
Create ASP.NET Web API Project in Visual Studio
Step 2:Choose your option as below and click on Next..
Step 3:
Choose your next steps as below and click on Next to proceed, make sure to choose authentication type as None
Step 4:
Create a ASP.NET Core Web API Project
Step 5:
By adding Power Platform as a service dependency, you can update an existing custom connector, or create a new one from your API.
If you want to expose your local running API to a public endpoint, I prefer using Dev Tunnels feature of Visual Studio…
That’s it, you have started running your API.
Step 6:
Now let’s create a Mobile App with Power Apps…with the same login you have used for the Visual Studio to create a custom connector..
Step 7:
First check if Custom Connector has been created in your tenant and authenticate the connection….navigate to https://make.powerapps.com and click on Discover at the left of the page….and then click on Custom Connectors, you should see a connector which we created from Visual Studio….nice isn’t it…
Step 8:
All you need to create a connection by clicking on the + sign available..
Once connected, now try creating a mobile Canvas App..
In the Canvas App, try adding data…and search for Weather Sample which you created, you should see something like below…
Step 9:
Once the web API is running in your development environment, you can debug in real time and even Hot Reload your code.
While you may have noticed this or not, but it’s real. Now Dynamics 365 CE existing table types have a new companion called Elastic, it is yet to be announced.
However let’s take a quick look of the table types showing up when you were trying to create a new one in Dataverse.
While everyone is aware about Standard, Activity, Virtual types in Model Driven Apps. Elastic tables are new tables which came in to Dataverse and probably it will be announced in the upcoming Microsoft Build 2023.
From my view, Elastic tables were
1. Built similar to the concept of Elastic Queries in Azure which is usually meant for the purposes of Data archiving needs.
2. You can scale out queries to large data tiers and visualize the results in business intelligence (BI) reports.
3. Elastic Query provides a complete T-SQL Database Querying capability on Azure SQL, possibly Dataverse.
Hope we get all the capabilities released with Elastic Queries of Azure SQL be released in Dataverse as well.
Do you know you can change the Data type of an Primary column between Single Line of Text and Autonumber even after creation of your entity specifying a defined Primary Name Column. There is a catch….
So let’s see…
I first created a brand new Table called Demo Table and kept the Primary Column as Single Line of text. Earlier once the table is created, you will not be able to change the Primary name column if you wish to, the only way was to delete the table and re-create it with the correct type. But now you can change the type of the column at least to a unique autonumbering.
I want the Primary Name column to be unique, but when I look at the data in my table captured, I see many duplicates.
So let’s change the data type of the primary column data type to Autonumber.
The primary field look as below initially…
Select the Data Type available…
Now Select the Autonumber from the drop down available…you can optionally specify any custom prefix which you want for your Autonumber…and click Save and publish the customizations.
Now go back to your model driven app and then try creating a new record for the respective entity.
Since it was a primary field column, it is by default made mandatory…what’s up…the Autonumber column data type change is not reflecting….this is the same even if you check and publish the solution multiple times. Neither you can’t specify the field value because you already choose this to be an Autonumber and system should create it by itself.
If you were scratching your head, then this simple tip will help…
Just make the field read-only from the form where this field is being referred, so you don’t need to really enter value for it…then publish the customizations.
Once you have done…
Now try to save the record..
There you go, you can see an Autonumber being populated in the primary field…
Here is how I have quickly achieved the synchronous Retrieve multiple call using Web API and Promises with the help of JavaScript. I don’t want to make my post too detail, but I would like to share the approach.
All I want to do is to just Restrict saving the Contact creation if the Postal Code entered is not present in the system. But this call should be synchronous as the message should be shown immediately incase postal code is not found in the system and prevent saving the contact record. All you need to do is simple, just call the below function on change of Postal Code in Contacts.
Here in place of XMLHTTPRequest, I have used Xrm.WebAPI so that it won’t show a critial warning in Solution Checker.
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I recently came across the above error for one of my Dynamics 365 Plugins…this blog talks about applying a quick fix.
While debugging our Plugin logic line by line to understand why it’s not working, observed this error for messages like RetrieveMultiple, Retrieve when I use any Organization Service call.
This was a .Net version downgrade issue caused by ILMerge as I downgraded one of the DLL to 4.6.2 version from 4.7.1. If you see this issue even without downgrading your DLL, you can use this fix.
After some research I came across this article and applied the same to my assembly which fixed the issue. Added these lines to my AssemblyInfo.cs class file..
We recently came across a situation where the new and existing email templates keeps showing a xml as below.
This kept us annoying as already the existing ones are created using Rich Email Template editor. At first check, we verified in our Dev and SIT, badly we saw that this is same in both the environments. We double confirmed that no changes were made to the OOB Email template form, so we doubted that there was something wrong with our environment. Luckily we have one more environment where we able to see the email templates working fine. Then we confirmed that there is related to email template form related issue. Also when we tried to open the existing email templates in new designer from https://make.powerapps.com, they opened without any issue.
Fix: Open your model driven app in your custom solution created and launch it by double clicking on it. Just verify it the forms selected for Email Template entity….
The fix is quite obvious and there you are..inorder for email template to show properly, you should select Default UCI Template type form.
While its been quite sometime since Microsoft shipped the Solution checker and App checker, these tools can help a developer to validate all the solutions that was being built before moving to higher environments. It is always advisable to run solution checker once your solution is developed so this can help you achieve better performance following the Power Platform best practices. Previously we used to send for Code review to senior folks but now with this tool, even the junior developer working at the ground level can easily understand and can make the necessary tweaks in the solution.
Solution Checker serves as a static analysis tool for the developers to check any platform related issues.
The solution checker analyzes these solution components:
Dataverse custom workflow activities
Dataverse web resources (HTML and JavaScript)
Dataverse configurations, such as SDK message steps
Note: Solution checker won’t analyze plugins in solutions. Plugin validations are modernized and will eventually the focus is on the native plugin authoring time, which will help you detect and fix issues earlier. So if you were looking for improvements in Plugin code, this will not help you.
Once solution checker starts running, it will be shown as below with a loading symbol on solution checker
It would take a few minutes to complete the process and will be based on the size of the solution. Once this process is complete, you should be able to download the results or view the results like below
If we open the results file, it shows the potential issues or improvements along with their severity which helps us to prioritize the issues which we need to work upon.
The report can also be downloadable excel file with analysis shipped in Zip format.
Now that we have seen what is solution checker, let’s see what App checker is and its pro’s and con’s.
App Checker:
The App checker is now available to help provide a clear list of formula issues in your app, and to provide items to fix to make your app accessible
This helps to make debugging, performance and best practice decisions an easier and more guided experience.
This is an ideal way to check the formulas you wrote for your Canvas Apps.
There isn’t any possibility to download the app checker results but you can analyze the results on the fly in canvas apps.
To conclude you can think of Solution checker is a tool to check Model Driven Apps and App checker is a tool for Canvas Apps. Hope you will use this great features to improve your solutions and design according to best practices.
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