Company Blog Portals

A little late in the game as Power Virtual Agent is already in Public Preview and trials are available, but I wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to create a bot, publish it and add it to your Power Apps Portal page.

Power Virtual Agents allows user to quickly and easily create powerful bots using a graphical no-code graphical experience. To start creating our first bot, we navigate to powerva.microsoft.com or aka.ms/TryPVA which will redirect to powervirtualagents.microsoft.com.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 2019 Release Wave 2 is not available for early adopters. The release is scheduled to start deployment to production environments starting in October of 2019. During August and September, Microsoft Dynamics customers check out the upcoming list of updates that will be released in October.

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.

In a recent project, we had a requirement to display cases to the portal that are associated with either Contacts or Accounts. Our case entity had a related entity called Case Contacts, and our account entity had a related entity called Account Contacts. The account entity had a list of all the cases associated with the account.