I always wanted to have a boat. But you know what they say: there are two happy days in the life of every boat owner – the day they bought the boat and the day they sold it. Ah, you meant BOT? Oops… Well, same story, as it turned out, kind of “meet the creator” moment.
In this video, Derik will walk you through the process of creating a chat boat bot with Power Virtual Agents.
Need to reference a fixed record, for example, Accounts Payables, or SARS-CoV-2? Challenge with fixed records is that we have no idea what the record identifier is, how to reliably search for the record and how to pass it as a parameter between environments.
Why not to use a fixed guid and create that entity when needed?
Something like this:
Cover photo by Thorn Yang from Pexels
You try to log in to https://make.powerapps.com, but you can’t log in because you get a “sign in required” dialog with the error “a silent sign-in request was sent but none of the currently signed in user(s) match the requested login hint.”
If you get this error, clear your browser cache or recreate your browser profile. When you log in to make.powerapps.com for the first time, answer “yes” when asked if you want to stay logged in.
By hitting yes on the stay signed in dialog, the AAD cookie will not expire and you should not see the silent sign-in error.
The wand picks the wizard
Nick Doelman
Too tired to read? Why wouldn’t you listen instead – t.j.
It’s been my observation that with a few notable exceptions, people in the Power Platform community primarily focus on Power Apps or on Power Automate. Lots of people will use both, but generally people are more “app people” or “flow people.”
I don’t have a strong preference between the two, and I regularly use and enjoy both platforms, but I’ve had conversations with people in the community that say something along the following lines:
Flow Person: “I love Power Automate, but Power Apps (canvas apps) are confusing.”
Apps Person: “I can write canvas apps all day long but you need to be a developer to use Power Automate.”
I’ve also noticed that if you suggest a flow solution in the Power Apps forum or an app solution in the Power Automate forum at powerusers.microsoft.com, people will give you funny looks.
Intrigued by this phenomenon, I interviewed some of my friends in the Business Applications community to see what they thought was behind this divide. Why does one tool seem accessible and easy to some while difficult to others?
Continue readingI had things stolen from me, I gave things away on many occasions. But I never ever lost anything. What’s the secret? Time perception.
I do not lose things, I only temporarily misplace them
The Enabler
Consider this. Last year I created a folder for all the good tips coming in from the fellow tipsters, users, developers. (Your email can land in that folder too if you send it to jar@crmtipoftheday.com). Then I lost misplaced that folder. Then I found it again (SEE?). For the next few days I’m going to be bringing these tips to life. Today’s tip is from Michael Aarvik.
I truly hope that one of the traits that differentiate me from, say, an ungrateful baboon, is ability to recognise when I’m wrong and apologise to Jeff Klosinski who sent not one but two tips an EFFING YEAR AGO and I haven’t published it.
In my defense I couldn’t reproduce either. But you know how can you tell a good tip? It stands the test of time. Today I went back, played a bit and discovered that when combined, those two tips just like sodium and water produce kapow! of one powerful trick.
Continue readingOne taketh one giveth (or other way around). Returning a favor to AK who asked:
How does the portals handle uploading of virus?
(Want your favor returned? Send your awesome tip to jar@crmtipoftheday.com!)
There are multiple mechanisms you can put in place to protect your users from the viruses (no, not that virus, unfortunately).
Continue readingI need to perform some data… uhm… “augmentation”. Easy as using Power Automate – get all the records, loop through, fudge I mean augment the data. Right? Except there could be more than 100,000 records. Why 100K? That’s the maximum you can get with the List Records action. (Wanted to insert a reference here but that limit does not seem to be documented at all… Oh, well, save it for another tip). In short: I need quickly to find out the total number of records in couple entities. On top of that, those were the entities not exposed outside of their parent entities, like Order Product or Invoice Product.
Even if you are not a developer there are couple Web API methods you can add to your toolbox and RetrieveTotalRecordCount function is one of them.
https://orgname.crmN.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/RetrieveTotalRecordCount(EntityNames=['logical_name_1','logical_name_2', ...])
for example:
https://foobar.crm.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/RetrieveTotalRecordCount(EntityNames=['salesorder','salesorderdetail','invoice','invoicedetail'])
This is what comes back:
of the
{
"@odata.context": "https://foobar.crm.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/$metadata#Microsoft.Dynamics.CRM.RetrieveTotalRecordCountResponse",
"EntityRecordCountCollection": {
"Count": 4,
"IsReadOnly": false,
"Keys": [
"salesorder",
"salesorderdetail",
"invoice",
"invoicedetail"
],
"Values": [
6679,
10547,
17568,
59618
]
}
}
Nice and easy, right?
Cover photo by Amornthep Srina from Pexels.
You create a model-driven app and open it in the Dynamics 365 mobile app or the Power Apps app (now supports model-driven). But when you click new record, you get a form but you cannot enter in data correctly — maybe there are some missing fields or something else is wrong.
Dynamics 365 mobile uses Quick Create to create records. If you don’t have quick create enabled or a quick create form created for the entity, Dynamics 365 will generate one for you based on the main form.
To quote the official documentation:
Dynamics 365 mobile apps use quick create forms for creating new records. If an entity already has a quick create form configured for it, the mobile apps use that form. If an entity doesn’t have a configured quick create form, Power Apps generates a quick create form for creating records in the mobile apps based on the main form definition.
https://docs.microsoft.com/powerapps/maker/model-driven-apps/create-edit-quick-create-forms
So if you don’t get the expected results, enable quick create on the entity and create a quick create form that contains the desired fields.