Community plays an important role in everyday work life, at-least fifty percentage of my D365 and power-platform knowledge is gained from community(Blogs, Videos, Forums Etc..), that is why I love being part of awesome MS community.
Recently one of my clients said he doesn’t want to use the next button in the business process flow but something similar in the form is required. I do not agree such requests but since they are not really using the business process flow, the request looked relevant. I had to show him a POC on the same day itself. This is were the community comes to help. I logged in to PCF Gallery and searched for something similar, within few seconds found this PCF mask with Fabric-UI Icons for two-option field by David Rivard.
Boom!! Cloned the git repo and POC is ready in an hour.
Added a client side script to change tab when the field value is toggled.
This is not a production ready control, its just a copy I made from a cloned Git repo.
One of my customer complained during a UAT session that, it’s too difficult for her to add new record using + button in a sub-grid, as it takes her to a new record window and she has to perform too many navigation. She was happy, when I enabled the quick create forms.
But, I was not happy and I wondered why OOB editable grid is not supporting this. I thought to give it a try using PCF controls, and this is the result.
Initially, it was not easy as we need to query the metadata to get field type for each column in the view. Following are the steps to configure smartgrid.
Primary Lookup: Logical name of the lookup field for the relationship. for example contact sub-grid in the account is “*parentcustomerid_account”.
Primary Entity Set: Entity set name of the current entity where the sub-grid is added
This is to set the related lookup using Web API, you can use Rest Builder to get these parameter values correctly, for example if contact sub-grid in account form is using parent customer relationship, to set the account lookup in contact following code is used var entity = {}; entity[“parentcustomerid_account@odata.bind“] = “/accounts(xxxxx-xxxx-xxxx)”;
Known bugs.
Does not support N:N
Validation for empty rows.
Does not support composite fields(customer lookup).
Poor CSS 🙂
Planned enhancements
Inline editing.
Validation for mandatory fields
This is not a perfect replacement for Quick create form, but you are always welcome to enhance and add features to Smart Grid Github Repo here.
So busy with year ending and 2020 plans. AsvI promised “The pro version will be released in two months”, I have to release the pro version today. Really sorry for the poor CSS, am actually bad at styling stuffs 😦 . But you can always improve the style and features in the Github, any updates are appreciated. Here is the github repo link.
Create a view with the required filters. If you do not require the control to consider certain activity types, you can exclude them in your view filter. The control will consider only the records returned by the view selected.
Add sub-grid to the form with the created view.
Add Activity Summary control to the sub-grid.
Note: If you need to exclude certain activity types, apply the same logic in the view filter.
It’s been a while since PCF controls were released for general availability. I was busy with my project schedules and finally, I managed to try out one. The Activity Summary grid. We can have activity timelines or sub-grids to view the activities under a record but these do not provide a high-level glance on activities. So I created one PCF to show activity summary, count of each type of activity under a record. This comes with Zero configuration. Whattt?? Yes, Zero configuration.
Create a view with the required filters. If you do not require the control to consider certain activity types, you can exclude them in your view filter. The control will consider only the records returned by the view selected.
Add sub-grid to the form with the view we created.
Add Activity Summary control to the sub-grid.
Boom! Done.
Wait is there an advanced version? Yes I will be releasing Activity Summary Pro in next 2 months :).
There are scenarios where we need to configure approvals in Dynamics 365, for example, mark an account as a premium customer after approval or qualify leads after approval etc. We used dialog control to capture approval request and comments but, now dialog controls are depreciated and not advised for use in new projects.
As per Microsoft’s initial announcement
Dialogs are deprecated and are replaced by mobile task flows (available as of the December 2016 update), and business process flows. Both task flows and business process flows will continue to evolve to make the transition easier.
But either tasks flow or business process flow was not a perfect replacement for Dialog. Knowing this pain from users, Microsoft has now modified the announcement.
Even though I knew canvas apps can be now embedded in model-driven apps, I hadn’t thought of this option until I came across this new announcement, so tried replicating my approval dialogs with a canvas app and it works fine. Pheww!!!! 🙂
For testing purpose I replicated the dialog for creating approval request for Account entity.
created a canvas app to create approval request.
This sample app changes account status to pending verification and captures the comments in one custom field.
2. Now we need to call this app from account form, obtain the app ID from app details section.
select app details to get the App GUID
3. I need to call this canvas app as a popup when user clicks a button. I created a custom button for account entity-> added a JavaScript as button action to call an HTML web-resource and embedded my canvas app in this html I-frame.
I know you have many questions now. "https://web.powerapps.com/webplayer/iframeapp?source=iframe&appId=/providers/Microsoft.PowerApps/apps/56123673-f45c-4b96-b9e6-ece1b0a8069a&ID="+AccountID;
App GUID I explained in step 2, now regarding custom parameter, I deliberately didn’t mention it when we discussed the app creation and kept for this section. When we open this canvas from an account form(like we start a dialogue) the app needs the record GUID to update the account status
I have used form control in the canvas app and filtered the item using the ID Parameter.
Please note this is a basic app I tried for testing purpose and needs many improvements to use in a live project. you are always welcome to discuss with on this app.
Finally, the expected next version of Dynamics 365, V9.0 is available from today. I’ve been so excited about the V9.0 new features and finally got a chance to play with it today.
I have been playing around with the entities, grids, new controls, settings etc. This will be the first blog post of this ‘First Look’ series, I have added the things I found interesting in the new version so far, I will be writing more about the features of V9.0 in next posts.
Unified Interface:
Alright, let’s start with the Unified Interface (UI) introduced, the UI looks pretty clean and organized now with the borders for the containers, word wraps, etc.
As mentioned in the below image,
Unnecessary white spaces are reduced.
Word wrap, borders for the containers – it gives a clean look
Recently I had a requirement where our client’s support and maintenance team wanted a feature through which they can view the privileges for a record for all active users in the system. Ok, let me take a moment to explain here.
Suppose the support team wants to run a regular security check and identify what privilege does a specific user have on specific account records. You might be thinking that is that this hard? After all we can go to the user and identify the security roles of the user. And then determine what access privilege does the security role have on the account
Simple isn’t it? Well it is not. And specially with CRM 2016, a user might end up getting a specific privilege on record through any of the following.
