Category: No code solutions

Power Platform Requests usage…check it out in a no code way now in Admin Center(Preview)

Hi Folks,

As a Power Platform Admin/Consultant…did you often worry about your Power Platform Request Limits and usage left…? Do you receive warning messages from Microsoft regarding the usage of your database exceeded..? Want to see what are Custom Plugin Errors encountered while using your Model Driven App targeting Dataverse….then want to consolidate them and forward to your team to look into the issues without much efforts….then you were in the right place…

Just login with your credentials to admin page https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/.

Expand Resources to the left…to find the Capacity menu

If you just want to know only the data usage, then you can ahead and click on Download as shown above to get one.

Want to get in depth analysis…then click on Details as highlighted in the same snap above.

This page shows your Database usage/File usage and respective categorizations by table as below..

These are reports which I was able to extract from my trial environment, however all the reports were not available currently in my region. Yes, this is expected as this feature is still in preview and not recommended for Production Projects as of now. Definitely in the future…

Note:

  1. Many people including me till now thought that Plugins or at least any operation performed within Model Driven app will not be counted for the API request limits. But…
  2. If the requests are making CRUD, assign, or share–type requests, they’ll count except internal requests. For classic workflows, this includes actions such as checking conditions, starting child workflows, or stopping workflows.
  3. You should never use any third party tools for Integration whenever you were facing any request limit issues.
  4. Request limits are applied differently for licensed users and Non-licensed users.
  5. You can add more capacity to any of your products by assigning your environment in the manage addons page.

Hope you found this post helpful…

Cheers,

PMDY

Impersonation – Level Up Hidden Feature that every Power Platform CE Developer ought to know

Hi Folks,

By this time, almost every Dynamics 365 Developer had some day or the other used Level up in their Custom Engagement consultant career.

While every one out in the Dynamics CRM Space know about the widely popular God mode available in Level Up which helps in the day to day administration and maintenance activity of CE applications.

Today in this blog post, lets see how we can achieve impersonation using Level up. We all know about impersonation in Dynamics CRM possibly using Plugins via Plugin Registration tool or directly through code.

But do you know, using Level Up, do you know that you even don’t need to write any piece of code but can impersonate to any user in the system with thin a few clicks right from your browser. If this interests you, just follow along…

Just open the level up chrome extension. This is how your home screen look like once opened..to use this feature, just click on Impersonate as highlighted in the below image. For all this activity, I am logged in as Admin user to the system.

Next you can search with the username with whom you want to impersonate with i.e. here I would like to impersonate with my user account. You can search and impersonate with any user in the system.

Once you click on SEARCH USER

Upnext, click on impersonate button available as below

It opens a new window impersonated with the user account as the user choosen for the impersonation.

The screen shows as the user pavan is the logged in user…

Now you can perform all the operations same as what user pavan has…how cool is it…this feature perfects suits when you want to test out the application security roles where you would like to make a change to a user role and assign to other team member, test it without needing his/her presence. Cool to know, isn’t it….

References:

You can install the extension on Edge, Firefox and Chrome.

BrowserStore Link
Chromehttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/level-up-for-dynamics-crm/bjnkkhimoaclnddigpphpgkfgeggokam
Firefoxhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/level-up-for-d365-power-apps/
Edgehttps://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/level-up-for-dynamics-365/mdjlgdkgmhlmcikdmeehcecolehipicf

GitHub for source code and project documentation

Cheers to Nataraj Yegnaraman who developed this cool tool…

Thanks for reading…

PMDY

Restore your deleted Power Automate Flows – Quick Tip

Hi Folks,

Have you or some one in your team accidentally deleted some your flows and want them to be back..? Then this post is for you…

There are the two ways you can restore deleted flows up to 20 days in either way…once after 20 days, even Microsoft Support couldn’t recover your flows.

In this blog post, we will see how you can recover your flows using first approach using Power Automate Management connector which is much simpler.

All you need is a button flow with two Power Automate management connector actions—List Flows as Admin and Restore Deleted Flows as Admin.

So let’s see…

I have a very simple flow as below…

But is has been failing due to some authentication issue, so I have deleted it…

Later I understood the root cause for the authentication issue, I want the flow created to be back. But no problem, you can recover your flow as below…So follow these steps to quickly get your deleted flow back…using an another flow…

Choose a manual trigger…

Next add an action, and choose an operation by searching list flows as admin.

Select your environment in the connector

Save your flow and test it…

Once your flow is successful, verify the outputs..scroll to find out the flow, check for the display name and note down the name associated.

This connector will list down all the flows created in your tenant…when you expand the raw OUTPUTS/value. Note the name which is nothing but the Guid of your flow.

Add Restore Deleted Flows as Admin action and run the flow by searching for the same as below.

Add the Restore Deleted Flows as Admin action from the Power Automate Management Connector.

In the Flow field, enter the name value ie. Guid noted from previous step ie.

9c4be0d4-b54f-4ac3-969e-01154b7f98bb

Save the flow, and test/run it.

You can note your flow is back, you can find out under My Flows but it’s disabled state.

Note:

  • The steps in this article apply to both non-solution and solution flows.
  • Flows that were deleted more than 20 days ago can’t be recovered. Both restore methods (PowerShell script and Power Automate Management connector), as well as Microsoft Support can’t help to restore them.
  • After you restore a flow, it defaults to the disabled state. You must manually enable the flow, per your requirements.

Incase if you were good at Power Shell, you can utilize this approach.

Cheers,

PMDY

Retrigger your Cloud Flow – Quick Tip

Hi Folks,

Today I am writing about a simple tip about Power Automate trigger which exists from quite a while but many people might not know it…stop the suspense. Let’s get into the use case…for Power Automate flows running on a trigger..

Are you tired of making the action which triggers your flow each and every time, then you can use this tip..

Just click on Test from top right bar as below..

Then in the pop up menu, select Automatically and check With a recently used trigger.

Later you can select any of the recently successful or failed executions to re-trigger your flow, no more hassles or manual actions to trigger your flow.

Hope this helps some one…trying to re-trigger their Automated cloud flows…without invoking their flow using an actual trigger.

Cheers,

PMDY

Power Fx Fomula Data type – your new companion in addition to Calculated fields in Dataverse [Insight]

Hello Folks,

I believe ever Power Platform professional working on Dataverse had one or other time got a chance to work on calculated fields. Actually it provides an easy way to perform any calculations for the supported data types since it has been introduced with CRM Version 2015 update 1.

Here is a very simple example of simple calculation to get your Fx data type up and running in few seconds….follow along….

Navigate to https://make.powerapps.com/

Open your solution, navigate to the columns in any table….for simplicity I am taking example of Accounts table…

Now create new column as below

Key values for the field, make a note that the data type (Fx) is selected

I already have two fields as below already on the form for calculating the Annual revenue per Employee from Annual Revenue of the company…

So now let’s write a simple Power Fx formula to calculate the Annual Revenue per Employee…the expression goes as below…

Annual Revenue is a currency field and Number of Employees field is single line of text. As soon as you save, system automatically identifies the data type as Decimal Number as shown above, click on save and publish the form…

Let’s see the actual use in the form…as soon as you enter the values for Annual Revenue and Number of Employees and save, the value for Calculated Revenue for the Employee field value will be calculated by the Power Fx expression.

Hope this will be useful in future for your implementations…

Points to keep in view:

  1. This formula column is in preview right now at the time of writing this blog post.
  2. And currently, formula columns can’t be used in roll-up fields or with plugins.
  3. You can use the following operators in a formula column:
    +, -, *, /, %, ^, in, exactin, &
  4. Microsoft Documentation says that the Currency data type isn’t currently supported but it works actually.
  5. The Text and Value functions only work with whole numbers, where no decimal separator is involved

Ref: Formula Column

Cheers,

PMDY

What is Solution Checker and App Checker in Power Apps – Quick recap

Hi Folks,

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:

  1. 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
  2. This helps to make debugging, performance and best practice decisions an easier and more guided experience.  
  3. This is an ideal way to check the formulas you wrote for your Canvas Apps.
  4. 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.

Reference:

Solution checker from MS Learn

Apps checker from MS Learn

Cheers,

PMDY

Top Picks for Power Apps

Top Picks for Power Automate

Top Picks for Microsoft Azure

Dynamics CE integration with Logic Apps – A quick review…

Hi Folks,

This blog post talks all about integration of your Logic apps to your Dynamics CE instance and it’s advantages. Lets get started…

By the way, I can’t redefine the definition provided by Microsoft, so here it goes.

Azure Logic Apps is fully managed integration PaaS service that helps you schedule, automate, orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need to integrate apps, data, systems, and services across enterprises or organizations and simplify how you design and build scalable solutions for app integration, data integration, system integration, enterprise application integration (EAI), and business-to-business (B2B) communication, whether in the cloud, on premises, or both. It’s simple to say that you can integrate any system and it is built on a containerized runtime.

Now let’s understand how does the logic apps work:

Every logic app workflow starts with a trigger, which fires when a specific event happens, or when new available data meets specific criteria. Each time that the trigger fires, the Logic Apps engine creates a logic app instance that runs the actions in the workflow. These actions can also include data conversions and flow controls, such as conditional statements, switch statements, loops, and branching. As soon as the Logic App stops running, these resources are discarded.

The interesting part here is that Logic Apps is more developer friendly and can used directly create integrations using logic apps either from Visual studio, Visual Studio Code or browser.

We were given flexibility to choose the type of Logic Apps, Single-tenant and multi-tenant. While creating logic apps, we can use Standard or Consumption based resource type. Logic Apps can create complex orchestrations and it is serverless. This means there is no upfront knowledge required for developer about the infrastructure. You have to bear in mind that it is both a stateful and stateless service unlike Azure Function which is stateless. It allows you to use webhooks as triggers. Coming to the pricing part, the price of Microsoft Azure Logic Apps is inexpensive. Look at it’s architecture below

You can simply edit your Azure logic App in Visual studio code / Visual studio and push your changes to your Devops repository…wow such a easy approach…don’t forget to try it out…

Do let me know if you have any queries or if you can add any more points, do let me know in comments….

That’s it for today…will come back next week with another article in #PowerfulAloneBetterTogether Series.

Cheers,

PMDY

Check your Dynamics CE performance

Hi,

Recently I was asked by one customer on how they can assess or check the performance of Dynamics CE as they were having some network outages and issues. I remembered that I used a tool earlier for checking my Dynamics CRM On premise engagement. So after checking for online version as well, got to know that we can use in the same way to find the performance for the online CE instance as well. You can follow as below…

To run the Diagnostics tool, you have to follow these steps.

  1. On the user’s computer or device, start a web browser, and sign in to an organization.
  2. Enter the following URL, https://myorg.crm.dynamics.com/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx, where myorg.crm.dynamics.com is the URL of your organization.
  3. Click Run.

The report displays a table with test and benchmark information. Of particular importance is the Latency Test row value. This value is an average of twenty individual test runs. Generally, the lower the number, the better the performance of the client.

In this way you can track your Dynamics CE performance at a given point of time to assess your network latency and bandwidth behaviors.

Cheers,

PMDY

Power Automate Cookbook

Hey Power Automate Fans!!,

Have u ever tried to checkout some of the cool examples and recipes developed by Power Automate Community.

If not, please check this out at this link…

Check out this link to submit your flow to the Community cookbook….

Cheers,

PMDY

How to create an app to Scan Receipts

Hi Folks,

Have u ever tried creating an App using Azure Cognitive Services.

Here is an excellent video tutorial on how to create an app to Scan Receipts using Azure Cognitive Services Form Recognizer API from MVP @Vivek Bhavishi..

Additional Resources:
Form Recognizer API Docs – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/form-recognizer/

Form Recognizer API Reference – https://westus2.dev.cognitive.microsoft.com/docs/services/form-recognizer-api-v2-preview/operations/AnalyzeReceiptAsync

Hope you will find it useful…

Cheers,

PMDY