Company Blog Portals

With the release of the documentation of the Portals Web API by Microsoft on July 16, I was waiting for a chance to test these features out and see how easy or hard it would be to get this working. There are a few requirements and prerequisites to get this working, which I will describe in this post. Remember that the portals are still in preview, which means that some of the content of this post might change prior to the final release of this API.

Today, July 8, 2020, Microsoft released the Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 2 plan documentation with a list of all the features that will be made available in the Wave 2 timeframe which starts October 2020 until March 2021. Going through all of the features is almost impossible unless you want a few hundred pages of documentation.

In this post, I am going to review some of my favorite and anticipated features in the Power Platform, especially Power Apps Portals and Model Driven Apps.

Creating navigation in a Power Apps portal application is straight forward, and can easily be done using Web Link Sets, but how about showing to the user where they are in the process and modifying the style of each element once the user has finished entering the data for that page. We have done this a few times and this involves the combination of liquid and JavaScript code on the different pages.

When working with model driven apps, we have the ability to navigate through the flow of the record using the Business Process Flow. The BPF is a great way to navigate through the different stages of the record, but what if that is just not enough. What if in order to complete the record I have to go through 10 or maybe more stages.

In previous work that I did, we implement logic that allowed us to navigate by displaying a popup window on the form (using alert.js), and we called the logic inside an HTML eb resource. A lot of these options are being deprecated and we will be prevented from calling webapi calls using HTML web resources.

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.