Power Platform..A trio..game changer…

Have u ever imagined that Microsoft will bring its all new diverse products covering Dynamics 365, Office 365 and standalone products under one roof making a Trio…to unlock the potential faster than you ever thought possible…if you were not aware…then this post is for you…

The main intention is to empower everyone with one connected app platform…Power Platform combines the robust power of PowerApps, PowerBI, and Microsoft Flow into one powerful business application platform –  providing quick and easy app building and data insights.

This is part one of 6 series blog posts helps you to understand the basics, in and out of this entire all new ecosystem. Upcoming blog posts will give you a deep insight on covering every individual aspect on this marvellous platform.

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Common Data Model:

The Common Data Model (CDM) is the shared data language used by business and analytical applications. CDM bridges the gap between disjointed data repositories, granting easier cross-platform business reporting.

Copy-of-Copy-of-Common-data-service

It consists of a set of a standardised, extensible data schemas published by Microsoft and partners that enables consistency of data and its meaning across applications and business processes. This allows apps to integrate and share data with each other without the need for extensive, custom integration by providing a centralized point where systems can come together and connect.

The Common Data Model is a secure method for exposing Microsoft databases that allows developers to build custom connections with other databases.

Common Data service:

The heart of the Microsoft Power Platform is the Common Data Service for Apps(CDS). These applications handle your data through the use of Microsoft’s Common Data Service for Apps (CDS). CDS is a cloud-based tool hosted on Azure which allows you to securely store and manage your business data. Data within the CDS is stored within a set of entities, a standard set of entities are included, however custom entities can be created for specific requirements to your organization and populate them with data using Power Query. The CDS for Apps is built on the Common Data Model.

Dynamics 365 applications, like Dynamics 365 for Sales, Service or Talent also use the Common Data Service to store and secure data used by the applications. This enables you to build apps using PowerApps and the Common Data Service directly against your core business data already used within Dynamics 365 without the need for integration. You can think of Common Data service as a common store allows for an easier app building experience, and a single set of logic to maintain and operate over the data.

Power Apps:

Power Apps enables users fostering via No Code solutions which improves productivity and reduces the time for the delivery.

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PC Mag. had rated the power apps as the best low code solutions available in the market..if you haven’t gone through this..read this article..

PowerApps at its core is a Platform as a Service. It allows you to create Mobile Apps that run on Android, iOS, Windows (Modern Apps) – and with almost any Internet browser..Read more about Power Apps in the upcoming blog post here…

Microsoft Flow:

Microsoft Flow is an online workflow service that automates actions across the most common apps and services and a trigger based system.microsoft-flow-templates

In total there are connectors for 323 applications and protocols at the time of writing, and you can write your own if you need a different one. You can read more about Flow and automating your business processes here…

Power BI:

Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Power BI can be simple and fast, capable of creating quick insights from an Excel workbook or a local database.

sCM_Power-BI-Preview

At the users flexibility….we can use…Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop, an online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the Power BI service, and mobile Power BI apps that are available on Windows phones and tablets, and also on Apple iOS and Google Android devices.

These three elements—Desktop, the service, and Mobile apps—are designed to let people create, share, and consume business insights in the way that serves them, or their role, most effectively.

Read more capabilities of Power BI here…

Connectors & Gateways:

Nevertheless we discussed all the other components as part of this framework, connectors and gateways plays a major role…Connectors are essentially proxy wrappers around the APIs provided by services that allow Microsoft Flow, PowerApps and Logic Apps to easily interact with the service. You can read more about connectors and gateways and much more in upcoming post…

That’s it for today…thank you for reading…

Cheers,

PMDY

[Quick Tip] – Error is usually caused by custom plug-ins that ignore errors from service calls and continue processing in Dynamics 365

Hi CRM Folks,

While we were working on Dynamics 365  On Premise 8.2 Version, we found this issue which is occurring on create of custom entity records in one of our environments. However we see the same customizations in both the environments.

After investigation by observing event logs, we found that this issue is caused due to some security issue. Later we identified that the plugins steps registered on create were running security context of user.

We were able to resolve this issue with the help of impersonation to run Plugins with higher privileges. For detailed info, see below reference.

Reference

Cheers,

PMDY

 

 

Unlock the lookup fields in a business process flow in D365

Problem statement:

Recently while working on issue in Dynamics 365, found that all the lookup fields included in a stage in the Business process flow are locked out and not able to edit and we were not able to move to next stage since these fields are mandatory. We modified to show the stage owner properly, but even though when that stage owner logged in these lookup fields used in the Business process flow are locked.

Solution:

Give Append and AppendTo privileges to the other entity so that these fields would be unlocked and at the same time you need to give read privileges on the related entity so that user could see this lookup field without any permission issue, you need to give write privileges too in order to edit and write data in to that field.

Hope this helps someone…

Cheers,

PMDY

{Advanced Customization Tip} Disable Advanced find for Non Admin users in Dynamics 365

deepeshsomani2013's avatarMSDYNAMICSBLOG BY DEEPESH

Requirement: In one of the recent queries that came across to me, Advanced find needed to be disabled for all the users in the Dynamics 365 except for System Administrator.

Solution: There are multiple possible solution one may think and apply. The best practice will be to try to convince the customer against such a customization and utilize Read privileges for restricting access to entities as needed on the basis of Security roles. However, if still there is client requirement like this we can achieve it as below:

1. Add Application ribbon under Client extensions in a solution and then open this solution in XRMToolbox, Ribbon Work bench 2016:

clip_image001

2. Add results_16 and results_32 png images as web resources and keep them ready as follows in the solution:

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3. Add a new button into the application ribbon and give it label as Result and under command put the command name…

View original post 148 more words

Cannot obtain value of the local variable or argument because it is not available at this instruction pointer, possibly because it has been optimized away in Visual studio 2017

Hi,

Recently we were debugging a D365 plugin in Visual studio 2017, able to hit the debugger but unable to get values to any of the variables. Getting the above error while debugging with the solution being in Release mode.

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Changed from the release mode to debug mode, deployed the solution and then able to debug and get the values.

Please refer to below posts  for more information.

Cannot obtain value of local variable

Blog from Microsoft

Hope this helps someone…

Cheers,

PMDY

 

No Plugins selected message in Plugin registration tool

Hi Folks,

When we were working on a plugin for D365 Online, faced the below mentioned error message in Plugin registration tool where it was not showing up the newly added the class to assembly.

However we were using the latest Plugin registration tool.

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Making the class as Public solved the issue.

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Hope this helps…

Thank you.

PMDY

Retrieve Multiple Plugin

Reblogged on ecellorscrm blog

muralikrishnasabbavarapublog's avatarMurali Sabbavarapu CRM Blog

Scenario:

  1. Users have organization level read access on Competitor entity in CRM.
  2. Competitor and system user entity have N:1 relationship and User lookup (Business Require) available in Competitor entity form

Have a requirement that the User should see “Competitor records” for which the respective user is tagged to and this should be applicable in all CRM areas (like  Advanced find, Lockups, Views…)

This can be achieved through Plug in with “RetrieveMultiple” message

Initially when the user logged in the system, he has access to all the Competitor records which are not tagged to him. (advanced find)

ret3

Below is the plugin code to achieve the above mentioned requirement.

public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)

{

try

{

IPluginExecutionContext context = (IPluginExecutionContext)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.IPluginExecutionContext));

IOrganizationServiceFactory serviceFactory = (IOrganizationServiceFactory)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IOrganizationServiceFactory));

IOrganizationService service = serviceFactory.CreateOrganizationService(context.UserId);

if (context.Depth > 1)

return;

WhoAmIRequest whoReq = new WhoAmIRequest();// To know the user who logged in

WhoAmIResponse whoResp = (WhoAmIResponse)service.Execute(whoReq);

Guid userid…

View original post 229 more words

Deep insight – All about adding Indexes and monitoring performance in Dynamics CRM

Hello,

Have you had a situation in Dynamics CRM where you need to delete some particular entity records satisfying some conditions using advanced find.

We have experienced a similar issue where in we were unable to delete records created in a Custom entity added into system created few mins. back. Even we were unable to find much complex relationships with other entities too. However the new records created were too not getting deleted using advanced find, even deletes from form also.

Verified and came to know that there weren’t any indexes available on that particular table. We added indexes on the columns on which we were retrieving data in advanced find and this solved our problem to delete the records created.

So here are few more tips about adding indexes in MS CRM. Don’t worry adding indexes on tables, columns or views is completely supported customization. However removing OOB indexes is not supported.

See this for more info.

Please check the below link to verify the system jobs which would run on a timely basis in Ms CRM on premise versions. These are configured during installation and are designed to optimize the database and reduce fragmentation. It’s good practice to re-configure these jobs to run out-of-hours.

Check the job editor available for versions starting with 2011 till 2016.

This job goes directly to the MSCRM_CONFIG database to update ScaleGroupOrganizationMaintenanceJobs table.

OOB jobs in Onpremise 

Check by running below queries

Verify if you need these jobs to run more often, you can monitor fragmentation with the following queries:

SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), index_id,index_type_desc,index_level,
avg_fragmentation_in_percent,avg_page_space_used_in_percent,page_count
FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats
(DB_ID(N'ORG_MSCRM'), NULL, NULL, NULL , 'SAMPLED')
ORDER BY avg_fragmentation_in_percent DESC

Or you can be more specific at the table level

SELECT avg_fragmentation_in_percent,* FROM
sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats ( db_id('ORG_MSCRM'),
OBJECT_ID('PrincipalObjectAccess'), NULL, NULL, 'DETAILED')

Utilize DMV(Data Management views):

Dynamic management views store SQL transactional information which can be used to monitor health, performance and diagnose problems. There are a number of DMV’s to retrieve a different number of metrics for different purposes; we will be looking in particular at the Index related and Execution DMV’s:

  • Index
    • sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats
    • sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats
    • sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats
    • sys.dm_db_missing_index_columns
    • sys.dm_db_missing_index_details
    • sys.dm_db_missing_index_group_stats
    • sys.dm_db_missing_index_groups
  • Execution
    • sys.dm_exec_query_stats
    • sys.dm_exec_requests

Index Usage
It’s important you check for Index usage because indexes consume memory and disk I/O resources when they need to be rebuild to keep the most up to date data.

To check for index usage run the following query, it’s important you check for Index usage because indexes consume memory and disk I/O resources when they need to be rebuild to keep the most up to date data.

select OBJECT_NAME(a.object_id),b.name,a.user_seeks,a.user_scans,a.*
from sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats a join ORG_MSCRM.sys.indexes b on
a.object_id = b.object_id
and a.index_id = b.index_id
where
a.database_id = DB_ID('ORG_MSCRM')
and b.name like 'myIndex%'
order by
b.name asc

The output of this query would be something like:

Jump

From the above screenshot is clear that _DMV_09 has not been used since it was created and therefore should be deleted.

Finding missing indexes:

Below a nice script you could use with references to missing indexes DMV’s

SELECT   migs.avg_total_user_cost * (migs.avg_user_impact / 100.0) * (migs.user_seeks + migs.user_scans) AS improvement_measure,   'CREATE INDEX [myIndex_' + CONVERT (varchar, mig.index_group_handle) + '_' + CONVERT (varchar, mid.index_handle)   + '_' + LEFT (PARSENAME(mid.statement, 1), 32) + ']'   + ' ON ' + mid.statement   + ' (' + ISNULL (mid.equality_columns,'')     + CASE WHEN mid.equality_columns IS NOT NULL AND mid.inequality_columns IS NOT NULL THEN ',' ELSE '' END     + ISNULL (mid.inequality_columns, '')   + ')'   + ISNULL (' INCLUDE (' + mid.included_columns + ')', '') AS create_index_statement,   migs.*, mid.database_id, mid.[object_id] FROM sys.dm_db_missing_index_groups mig INNER JOIN sys.dm_db_missing_index_group_stats migs ON migs.group_handle = mig.index_group_handle INNER JOIN sys.dm_db_missing_index_details mid ON mig.index_handle = mid.index_handle WHERE migs.avg_total_user_cost * (migs.avg_user_impact / 100.0) * (migs.user_seeks + migs.user_scans) > 10 ORDER BY migs.avg_total_user_cost * migs.avg_user_impact * (migs.user_seeks + migs.user_scans) DESC
Hope this helps someone figuring out to add indexes into their MS CRM table to improve the performance.
That’s it for today…hope you had enjoyed reading the blog…please share feedback on this…will come up with another interesting article next time.
Cheers,
PMDY

Transaction aware batch processing using ‘ExecuteMultipleRequest’

Rajeev Pentyala – Dynamics 365 Blog:

In this article, I am going to discuss about transaction aware batch processing in ExecuteMultipleRequest using ExecuteTransactionRequest.

Is ‘ExecuteMultipleRequest’ not a transaction aware?

  • By design, ‘ExecuteMultipleRequest’ is non-transactional.
  • Which means ‘Request’ objects added to ‘ExecuteMultipleRequest’ are independent of each other and if any exception occurred in any of the ‘Request’ will not roll back previously committed ‘Requests’.
  • However you have an option to stop the batch (i.e., By setting ContinueOnError = false), if any exception occurs.
  • Important to note is that, this behavior is not a transaction aware and ‘Requests’ executed prior to the error, will still be committed.

How can we achieve ‘Transaction’ in Batch execution?

  • Using ExecuteTransactionRequest, we can achieve ‘Transaction’ (i.e., Commit and Rollback) in Batch execution
  • ExecuteTransactionRequest will execute the all the ‘Requests’ in a single transaction.
  • If any exception occurred in any of the ‘Request’ execution, will roll back all the previously…

View Original Post

Hope this helps…

Happy CRM’ng.

Cheers,

PMDY

Issue configuring Data export service – Unable to connect to the Destination mentioned in the Keyvault URL

After knowing the wide advantages of reporting with the help of Data export service, I would like to share some tips and valuable resources for the same.

This Data export service in D365 by MVP Scott Durow is the first step to jump start your learning, people preferred to view instead video can better go through this Data export service blog content from MVP Nishant Rana.

Edit: 20 April, 2018: Suprizing what was Azure Key vault? Azure Key Vault helps safeguard cryptographic keys and secrets used by cloud applications and services.

Followed the steps mentioned, however I still used to receive error Unable to connect to the Destination mentioned in the Keyvault URL while configuring the data export service taken from the Secret Identifier in Azure obtained after running the Powershell script with all the details filled in.

I followed the fix provided in this Unable to connect with KeyVaultURL, but it didn’t help in my case.

Point to note for creation of this feature:

1.Don’t forget to create the login & username for the new Azure SQL Database, this is needed for the secret vault to communicate with the destination organization to load data.

2. After copying the Database connection string as mentioned, don’t forget to change the Username & Password in this string with details you had created in above step and don’t try with D365 login permissions.

Then I was able to validate the Keyvault URL successfully. Currently my Azure subscription is in South India, but still this data export feature works successfully.

 

Hope this helps someone trying to configure the Data export feature of Dynamics 365.

Happy CRM’ing.

Cheers,

PMDY