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…
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…
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:
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…
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.
You should never use any third party tools for Integration whenever you were facing any request limit issues.
Request limits are applied differently for licensed users and Non-licensed users.
You can add more capacity to any of your products by assigning your environment in the manage addons page.
This blog is just to let you know why you should stop implementing OData calls using V2.0 version. I am pretty sure almost every Dynamics CE project out there have used this OData calls definitely in their implementations from quite some time. While some of new implementations have replaced the logic using Web API, still some people go with using OData V2.0 calls to build their functionality using JavaScript.
Microsoft had actually planned to remove this endpoint from April 30, 2023. But they deferred this because many projects are’nt yet prepared for removal of this end point and help the customers prepare for this transition to Web API end point.
Identify if you still using OData V2.0 end point, actually Organization Data Service is an OData V2.0 endpoint which was introduced with Dynamics CRM 2011..it’s deprecated way back with Dynamics 365 CE version 8.0.
So now, how to identify where and all you were using OData End Points in your code…you shouldn’t expect that existing code will work with only minor changes and this work can be taken at a later stage. This was a high priority warning message from Microsoft stating the removal, so I urge all of you to be prepared for this removalvery soonand you shouldn’t be surprised.
So where to change…..?
Below are the places where you should change your way of implementation and align with Microsoft…
The Organization Data Service using this end point /XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc in Javascript, you can find it out with the help of the checker service rule web-avoid-crm2011-service-odata for identification. This can be code which was making OData calls to perform CRUD Operations on the current table or related table.
Check any other code, including PowerShell scripts, that send requests to this endpoint: /xrmservices/2011/organizationdata.svc.
Cross Check your Power BI reports or Excel Data sources that may be using this endpoint.
Note:
This announcement does not involve the deprecated Organization Service SOAP endpoint, meaning using Organization service in plugins. At this time, no date has been announced for the removal of that endpoint. At the time of writing this blog post, Microsoft didn’t announce whether this removal is only for Online or On Premise Versions.
Recently in one of our custom pages, we were getting the below error
“Invalid data from the network”
We had this setting “Formula-level error management” as On, switching it off was hiding this error on the page.
To fix it we tried removing the fields one by one to figure out the issue. Eventually, we saw the error was going away if we remove one of the option set fields from the gallery or comment it’s formula. Later when we removed and added the field back in the gallery and the error got fixed for us.
Recently while I was working with my Power Apps in Edge browser, faced this issue with no clue on first sight and see community reaching out to Power Apps forum. So thought of sharing simple work around.
I was using https://make.powerapps.com, while I clicked on Signout of my current logged in account in the maker portal. Next time when trying to login, it kept on prompting the message saying you need to signup. It takes me no where to re-enter my credentials, opening https://make.powerapps.com/ in other tab doesn’t help even.
As per Microsoft article referenced below, I have simply tried to clear my browser cookies and cache and soon able to open the maker portal without any issue.
As you all know Application Life Cycle Management(ALM) is very important for a project to become successful in this automation era. The faster is the iteration speed to deploy your solution to production, the more healthy your project is and so your stakeholders. This kind of Automation is usually made possible with the help of CI/CD Azure Pipelines. CI/CD for GIT Repo for Azure DevOps is famous from quite some time. You might have heard that Microsoft had got this kind of CI/CD architecture to Power Platform released in Preview last year and is now Generally Available(GA).
But if you still don’t really have a hands on and pretty new to get this into your project, then this blog post is for you. You don’t need to know Azure DevOps or at least you don’t need to be technical to use this new capability, even administrators can. All you need is to just follow along….You can download the presenation I had presented at Singapore User Group here…
First of all, let’s see what are the prerequisites to create a Power Platform Pipeline.
Four environments are recommended, but you can use as few as three environments to create a pipeline.
Dataverse database is a must in all the environments except the Host Environment.
Dataverse for Teams environments aren’t supported for use with pipelines.
You must have a Power Platform administrator or system administrator role.
Pipelines are a feature of Managed Environments. As such, the development and target environments used in a pipeline must be enabled as a managed environment. Standalone licenses won’t be required when you use developer or trial environments with pipelines. More information: Managed Environments.
If you want to share these pipelines, you should grant access by opening the security from the host environment. The Deployment Pipeline User security role grants access to run one or more pipelines.
Now let’s see how you can set up Power Pipelines…
You need to identify which of your environments you want to configure pipeline for. For a healthy pipeline, at least you need 3 environments ie. Dev, Test, Prod, however there is no upper cap.
So for configuring our pipeline, we need one more environment in addition to above which is nothing but Host Environment which serves as the environment which stores all the configuration of the pipeline.
So below are our environments we will be using in this tutorial…
First thing, you have to do is to set up the host environment which holds the configuration of your pipeline. The configuration is pretty much easy and intuitive to follow. Make sure you choose same region to all your environments and select type as Production for all environments except developer environment. You don’t actually need to create a database as this stores only the configuration.
In the same way, I have already created the host environment and I also have few trials which I will be one of them as my test environment and one as my Developer environment, we can also configure other environment but for brevity I am leaving one not configured. Make sure to check Create database for this environment while you were creating for all the environments except the Host Environment.
For setting up the pipeline, you need to have the Environment Id’s of the environments which you would like to configure ready. Follow this link if you don’t know how you can get them.
Copy and paste them in a notepad for your quick reference during configuration.
Open the host environment from Admin portal and click on Resources Option available and click on Dynamics 365 apps.
In the next window, click on Install app and in the list of apps, choose Power Platform Pipelines, click on Next and install the app after agreeing the terms of service.
Now you need to open the host environment from https://make.powerapps.com to configure the pipeline and you should an app for Deployment Pipeline Configuration as below.
Before moving further let’s understand the table structure used for the pipeline.
Open this app as below and configure the environments which you want to use in your pipeline, set up the Development environment from where you would like to deploy the changes to your target. Make sure you select Environment Type as Development Environment and provide the respect Environment Id which you copied to your notepad earlier as above.
Similarly configure the other target environments, but proceed to select as Target Environment as the environment type. Once after system validation is done, validation status is shown as successful and the environments setup will look as below.
Now you need to create a pipeline for the configured environments, once saved, link the development environment which you configured above.
Next is configure your target environments for the pipeline to which you would like to deploy your solutions, from the quick create, give a name, choose your Previous Deployment Stage lookup and select the target environment you would like to Deploy from the lookup.
Once setup, your power pipeline should look something as below.
Note:While you are configuring the first stage to deploy to Test environment, you need leave the Previous Deployment Stage as empty.
Now go back to your Development environment, include any power platform component which you would like to deploy to next environment, here for simplicity I added one Canvas App to the solution as below.
The Canvas App component added and as soon as you select or even before you should see a Pipeline symbol as highlighted below….
Note:This icon will be appeared if you have setup everything correctly, if you still don’t see this option when you try to deploy component from Dev, then you need relook at your configuration which you have setup in the host environment, either you gave the wrong environment Id or you configured incorrectly.
Once this icon is being shown, you are set to go…once you click on the Pipeline symbol, it takes you to a new screen showing your pipeline as below
All you need to just click on Deploy here and wait for a couple of mins to Deploy the solution to next environment to Test and you should see below screen. Then click on Deploy.
Once deployment is successful, then you should see Deploy to next environment(Prod) also enabled.
That’s it, lets see if our Solution is deployed to our Test and Prod Environment.
Prod Environment:
Tips:
Use environment names that indicate their purpose, I have used trial environments for demo purpose but this feature is Generally available, so you might try it out in your actual projects meaning the deployed solution will be managed and not editable as below.
Limitations:
Deleting the host environment deletes all pipelines and run data. Use caution and understand the impact of data and configuration loss as well as maker access to pipelines hosted in the environment.
After General availability all the environment will be automatically enabled as managed environments, so you don’t need to worry much about setting up the environment as Managed.
Licensing is also not a problem if you are a maker who’s creating the pipeline, you need to give the Deployment Pipeline Administrator and Deployment Pipeline User to the maker/user and share the pipeline for them to run it.
Hope you found this post helpful and you should definitely incorporate this feature in your projects to deploy managed solutions from one environment to another. How cool is this one….
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….
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:
This formula column is in preview right now at the time of writing this blog post.
And currently, formula columns can’t be used in roll-up fields or with plugins.
You can use the following operators in a formula column: +, -, *, /, %, ^, in, exactin, &
Microsoft Documentation says that the Currency data type isn’t currently supported but it works actually.
The Text and Value functions only work with whole numbers, where no decimal separator is involved
Today in this blog post, I would like to share how we can quickly set up Postman Environment to test out the Dataverse API’s right away. It’s very easy and doesn’t need any Client Id, Client Secret registration in Azure AD for Authorization if you follow these steps as the provided Client id works for all Dataverse environments, so let me take you through.
You just need to have a Dataverse environment that you can connect to and Postman desktop App in your machine(Preferably windows)
Lauch the Postman desktop application
Create the environment by click
3. Enter a name for your environment, for example, Blog Environment as below
4. Get the Web API end point URL for your environment with few simple steps as below…by going to Developer resources in make.powerapps.com
Then copy the Web API endpoint URL as below…
Next step is to add following key value pairs in Postman for connecting to Dynamics..please make sure you use the same clientid(51f81489-12ee-4a9e-aaae-a2591f45987d), it is the same to connect to any Dataverse environment.
Your updated configuration should look something as below in the Postman.
Click on save to save your newly created environment as highlighted below..
Now all you need is to generate access token in order to authenticate with your Dataverse environment to connect using OAuth 2.0
Follow the simple steps below..
Click on newly created environment, click on + symbol besides it as highlighted below
The following pane appears. Select the Authorization tab.
Set the Type to OAuth 2.0 and set Add authorization data to to Request Headers, if you scroll down a bit, you will be able to see Configure New Token option as below, else you wouldn’t.
In the Configure New Token pane, set the following values:
Name
Value
Action
Grant Type
implicit
Choose implicit from the drop-down
Callback URL
{{callback}}
Copy the value
Auth URL
{{authurl}}
Copy the value
Client ID
{{clientid}}
Copy the value
The settings should appear as below
Tip: If you were using the Postman to connect to multiple dataverse instances, make sure you clear your Cookies inorder delete the cookies in Postman.
Click on Get New Access Token button, within a moment, you should see a Azure Active Directory pop up to Authenticate your login from browser.
Click Get New Access Token.Once you click Get New Access Token, an Azure Active Directory sign-in dialog box appears. Enter your username and password, and then click Sign In. Once authentication completes, the following dialogue appears and just get the token with few more steps as below.
After the authentication dialogue automatically closes in a few seconds, the Manage Access Tokens pane appears. Click Use Token.
The newly generated token will automatically appear in the text box below the Available Tokens drop-down.
Test your connection
The following shows how to test your connection using WhoAmI:
Select GET as the HTTP method and add {{webapiurl}}WhoAmI in the editing space.
Click Send to send this request.
If your request is successful, you will see the data returning from the WhoAmI endpoint, like below:
Hope you have found this post useful…when you were working with Dataverse API’s.
In this blog post, I would detail about how you can you work with Code Components, it just takes only few minutes of your valuable time. Now-a -days everyone is moving from traditional HTML Webresources to PCF Code components. I used to be a pro-HTML Developer where I always want to always know how my code is running in browser. Usually every developer wants to try out how their code is working in local before proceeding further. So here we will see how you can run your component locally…and once tested we can deploy them to Dataverse.
So without any further due, let’s get into it…
Firstly you can download these code components from this link, now let’s see how we can use these components in our Apps. Follow with me with few simple steps as below..
2. Navigate to the folder and extract the zip file.
3. Open Visual Studio Code and navigate to that folder location(Many people suggest to use Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt, but believe me this is a lot easier)
The component’s run time can be found by navigating to the respective folder of the component..
4. Open a new Terminal and execute npm install command(I am assuming that you have node installed in your machine for working with this), this will add all the dependencies to the component folder, it should look something like below..
5. As this control is a prebuilt one, no need to execute build command.
6.Create a new folder using the command mkdir <folder name> inside the sample component folder and navigate into the folder using the command cd <folder name>, something like below…here I have named the component folder as IncrementComponent.
7. Now we will proceed with next steps of creating a new solution project inside the same folder using the following command:pac solution init --publisher-name <Name of the publisher> --publisher-prefix <Publisher prefix>
It should look as below
You should see solution folder components being updated as below
8.After the new solution project is created, refer to the location where the sample component is located. You can add the reference using the following command:pac solution add-reference --path <Path to the root of the sample component>
It should look as below
10. Now you have to generate a zip file from your solution project by building the project using the following command:msbuild /t:restore
Oops, you get an error as below…in order to resolve
If you just try to reverse engineer, the above error says that ‘msbuild’ is not recognized and instructs to check the path variable.
Inorder to fix this, I have followed blog and with minor tweaks, able to resolve the issue, i.e. if you have 64 bit Visual Studio 2022 version, you have to use the below path for environment variable instead of the one specified in the above blog.
Then you should be able to overcome the above error…and you should see a screen something same as below
The next step is to run your Code component in local test harness and see how if behaves before actually pushing to dataverse…so use the following command npm start while making sure terminal points to the exact folder location…
Now the code has been run in your browser, you just need to verify by going to the mentioned URL in the local machine.
There it was, you can see your component running in your local browser window….
These code components can be used in Canvas Apps, Model Driven Apps, Power Portals and adds much more flexibility than customizing with HTML Webresources.
Now you can use msbuild /t:restore command to create a zip file, we are good to use the PCF control by importing it to CDS.
Limitations:
Microsoft Dataverse dependent APIs, including WebAPI, are not available for Power Apps canvas applications yet.
Code components should bundle all the code including external library content into the primary code bundle. To see an example of how the Power Apps command line interface can help with bundling your external library content into a component-specific bundle, see Angular flip component example.
Code components should not use the HTML web storage objects, like window.localStorage and window.sessionStorage, to store data. Data stored locally on the user’s browser or mobile client is not secure and not guaranteed to be available reliably.
You can learn more about PCF Here…hope this helps….
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.
![Power Fx Fomula Data type – your new companion in addition to Calculated fields in Dataverse [Insight]](https://ecellorscrm.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/power-fx-template.png?w=1200)
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