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Canvas Apps, Dataverse, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Platform

Release wave time for the Power Platform again!

By Ben den Blanken Leave a comment

The first release wave of features for the upcoming year are available for us to look at! Always fun to digest what’s coming. And as always, it’s important to note that these plans are subject to change. Consider them as a general guide for what’s to come. Please remember that this is an evolution of the platform, not a revolution. Microsoft typically saves major announcements and game-changing features for their big events, so don’t expect any earth-shattering developments in this wave. Nevertheless, there are still some exciting updates upcoming that are worth taking a closer look at.

Now the first important announcement is about the planner itself. The Release Planner tool is now General Available and I encourage you to use it! Create your personal list of features you are exciting for and easily see what has changed since your last visit. Or you can create one to share with your team to keep track on new features you need in your solution. This is also an excellent example of dogfooding as it is build on top of Power Pages!

Shows an image of the Release Planner. This is now General Available to view all the planned feature releases.
Release Planner

I can categorize my highlight list in 4 topics; Improvements to the UI, Maker productivity, Application Lifecycle Management and Power Pages. And if you read more, I will address them as such in this blogpost!

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Dataverse, Power Apps

Set up Tasks for your Model-Driven Power App

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In this blogpost I will start with the basics of “Task based work”. A task system that consists of a framework to add and coordinate tasks from a Model-Driven Power App. It is not very complex to begin with, but I will add more complex functionality to it as we go. This functionality heavily depends on the integration scenario we want to implement. In this post I have summed up a few possibilities.

Scenario

A quick reminder of what we are working on. The big theme of my blog currently is the “Case of the broken screen”. A lot of my blogpost are about this business problem. A loyal customer has dropped their new and expensive phone and his screen is cracked. It is up to us to resolve this incident to satisfactory of the customer. It’s time to send out a replacement screen!

The caveat though, is a different department handles shipping. Sending a handwritten note or an e-mail to that department might get the job done, but it will not create tangible data to work with. So now we want to set out tasks to the logistic department who are not using our application. We also want to be able to track those tasks, make sure they get done and keep our customer informed of the status. Eventually you would want automation in place to be notified at the right time.

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Dataverse, Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Utilizing the AAD User table in an Approval Flow

By Ben den Blanken Leave a comment

You might have seen the new AAD User table appear in your environment. This table is available to us for a couple of months now. And you might wonder what it is and how you can use it. In this blog I will explain you what it is and how you can use this table to your benefit.

The AAD User table lists all users in your Azure Active Directory. It does not show AAD Groups. Did you know that the data of this table does not reside in your dataverse storage? It is actually a Virtual Table! Virtual Tables are tables that do not reside inside Dataverse, but instead reference a table from a different storage mechanism. It is incredibly powerful as it does not require you to copy data from another system. You can find if a table is virtual by looking at the type column of the table overview. So why is this interesting and what can you do with it?

Shows the Power Apps solution explorer where the table overview is highlighted. In it we highlight the AAD User as this is of the type Virtual.
AAD User Virtual Table
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Dataverse, Microsoft 365, Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Set out Tasks in a Microsoft 365 and Power Platform World

By Ben den Blanken 2 Comments

This is the start of our next chapter in our Business Process Flow and asynchronous work journey. How can our team keep track of tasks we need a different department to execute? In this post I want to explore different architectural choices you can make and what considerations there are. This of course depends on a lot of variables and I will try to give you some points what to think about. In other words I try to explain my thoughts whenever I say “It depends” as an answer!

Shows a meme of a person tapping the side of his head. The text above sais: "It depends". The text below reads: "Yeah.. Now I Don't have to explain anything"

This blogpost is part of a series where I explore how to support Asynchronous Work with Business Process Flows. The Business Process Flow is an old tool in our toolbelt. But coupled with all modern Power Platform and Microsoft 365 Collaboration capabilities it helps keep track of processes. Now we are on the topic of setting out tasks and keeping track of them.

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Dataverse, Power Apps, Power Platform

Top 8 picks for the Power Platform Release Wave 2

By Ben den Blanken One Comment

It is that time of the year again, the release wave is announced. Here we get a glimpse on what is on the backlog of the product teams. Of course everything on this list is subject to change and Microsoft reserves their major announcements for their big events. However it is still fun going through these items in bulk. So in this post I will give you my top 8 picks and interpretation for this release wave.

Shows the Modern Advanced Find
Modern Advanced Find

Now let me first start that my interpretation is not always the best! For release wave 1 I was skeptical how fast the Modern advanced find would reach the same features as the old advanced find. Boy was I wrong! Not only is it already a great modern update to the interface, it also has all the features you would want. Including the ability to download the FetchXML! It is time to tell your end-users about this as this will be turned on by default in October.

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Dataverse, Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Synchronous and On-demand Flow inside Model Apps!

By Ben den Blanken Leave a comment

Let me first start of with wishing you all a happy new year. I hope you all had a lovely holiday season. I enjoyed a few days off and spent it with my family. On to the subject at hand, synchronous and On-demand Flow in Model Apps. As most of you know Microsoft prefers us using Power Automate Flow instead of Classic Workflow. However there are still some gaps in functionality between the two.

When developing solutions I follow Microsoft guidelines as much as possible. This ensures that the solution is durable and I create the least technical debt. With that in mind, I now keep away from Classic Workflow and use Flow whenever I can. Last few weeks I tried to fulfill business requirements within these restrictions.

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Canvas Apps, D365 CE, Dataverse, Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Embedded Canvas App – Replacing dialogs – Part 2

By Ben den Blanken Leave a comment

In my previous blog post I started making an embedded canvas app to replace dialogs. I started off by creating the app, the screen, some basic navigation and the form. Finally, I added patch logic to save the screen. If you have not read part 1, do not worry this video shows the functionality. The patch logic shows the Relate function, which is very useful, so I would recommend to check that first.

In this post I want to focus on setting the owner of the task. Setting the owner of the task is important because this allows us to distribute tasks to teams or individuals. An entire team could then process the task assigned to them and work them to completion. In this case the credit check that the finance team has to perform will help us resolve the case.

I wasn’t able to set the owner of the task using standard functionality. The PowerApps CDS connector does not allow for updating the owner field. Neither does the Relate function work after the record is created. But of course I have a solution, we can create a synchronous Flow!

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Dataverse, PCF

PCF – Iban Validator

By Ben den Blanken 4 Comments

My first blog post is about my experience with the PowerApps Component Framework so far.

What excites me about this framework is that it provides developers with a native way to integrate development into Model-driven PowerApps / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. No longer are we restricted by IFrame’s where we have little connection to the app. It promises to provide us with the same API’s the Microsoft development team uses. Last but not least, this framework will come to canvas apps soon.

I created an IBAN validator. This is validation we build for a lot of customers, so this is a good component to start with.

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