Blogs Dynamics 365

Recently I had to work on a PowerApps/Flow solution that would connect to a Dynamics 365 data source. I have done various things previously with the Dynamics 365 connector, but when trying to do the same in my GCC environment, I could not see the Dynamics 365 connector. I thought it was removed, but then I checked my commercial environment and it was there.

I recently ran into a requirement to do a PoC on a PowerApps to be able to add and update records in a single screen in PowerApps. In order to implement the PoC I decided to test this out on the Contact Entity in a Dynamics 365 environment. I did not make any changes to the Contact Entity, but just used some of the Out of the Box fields. In order to implement this, I wanted to get a look and feel of a form that would look the same whether entering new information or editing existing information.

We start by creating a blank Canvas up using the Tablet layout. This will open a blank screen. On the screen we see the message Add an item from the Insert tab or connect to data. We click on connect to data, and select either new connection if you don’t see your dynamics 365 connection from there, or if it is displayed click on the connection. Select the connection (and authenticate if required), select the dataset (instance) and then in the Choose a table, select the Contacts entity. Click on Connect. The image below shows you the Data sources window after you connected to the environment.

Recently, I published a blog post on creating a PowerApp that validates a Credit Card number, and displays the correct image next to the card based on the Card number. As my first PowerApps Component Framework application, I took the same logic of the PowerApp that I created, and decided to create a PCF control that will do the same. I have also created a training guide for this, so that you can follow this logic step by step, which you can download at the bottom of this post.

Recently I had the need to create validation for ACH numbers and Credit Card numbers is a Dynamics application. This can be easily implemented in JavaScript using regular expressions, but I wanted to test this out using PowerApps.

I started by creating a new Canvas application, and adding the controls required for validation. I added a label and textbox for the Credit Card Number, and then an icon for showing valid number entry and another text box for displaying the proper results. This is shown in the screenshot below.

A few days behind schedule, but the highly anticipated Dynamics 365 version 9.0 for On-Premise deployments is not available for download. Preview releases have been available for a while now via the Microsoft experience web site, but on 11/2 Microsoft made this release public.

Ever since Microsoft purchased AdxStudios and replaced the product with Dynamics Portals, one of the biggest pains was the removal of SharePoint documents. The interim solution of course was available using Azure blobs with the Dynamics Labs solution which provided document uploads, but using the Out of the Box SharePoint Documents was a miss by a lot of Portal Developers.

When displaying entity lists on a web page, there is usually a default column in a view which is displayed as a hyperlink. The link to the page is displayed based on the Web Page for Details View and the ID Query String Parameter Name attributes on the Entity List form (as shown in the image below). The problem is, what happens if my page that is displaying the Entity List already has query string parameters, and you want to keep those parameters on the next page that you are going to display.

It is a pretty known practice today, that when creating a web application that requests data from customers, certain fields are masked so that the system can prevent the entry of incorrect data. This has been done in desktop applications for a long time and is now also very common in web based applications.

Recently I was working on a project, where the client needed all fields to have placeholders for accessibility reasons. When looking at the attribute metadata of the Entity Form, we are allowed to enter some text above or below the textbox control (or above the label), but the option is not available to prepopulate the control with some text when there is no data in it. After seeing a few community questions on how to implement this, I thought to share the solution.

Recently we had a requirement to change the Lookup Control in the Portal to look like a hyperlink, so that when the user clicked on the Hyperlink it would pop up the Lookup Dialog.
The Lookup control was displayed as part of an entity form, so the only way to really do this was with jquery.