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.
Sometimes your on-premise CRM system will show, some weird behaviors like workflows are not executing / plugins are not working / data imports are failing without any data issues etc…
I have faced certain issues like the entire system is not working , system will show error messages without any logs, the only message it displays is “an error has occurred”.
Following are the common issues you can check in such situations.
Ensure CRM Asynchronous services are running
From the server Administrative Tools select Services, and if the CRM Asynchronous services are not running ensure to start the services (if the Asynchronous services are not running CRM will stop working).
Ensure CRM Sandbox services are running
From the server Administrative Tools select Services, and if the CRM Sandbox services are not running ,please start the services. If the Sandbox services are not running CRM will stop working or the normal system jobs will fail without showing any valid errors .
Check IIS
Ensure the following in IIS
CRM application pool and CRM website are up. Try browsing the CRM website from IIS.
Make sure your SQL server and Reporting services are up
Ensure your local machine time is in sync with the server time
This may sound funny but trust me this simple point can save your many productive hours.
Recently my system failed to perform certain operations and I wasn’t able to connect the Xrm tools too. When I debugged I got the keyword “past time” , then I identified that the server time was different from my local machine.
If you have tried all the above steps and still you are not able to identify the issue,please check the server event viewer this may give you some details regarding the failure.
With on demand backups, you can make your own backup before making some significant customization change or applying a version update.
About CRM managed on demand backups:
You can back up Production and Sandbox instances.
You can only restore to a Sandbox instance. To restore to a Production instance, first switch it to a Sandbox instance. See Switch an instance.
Only CRM Online 2016 Update 1 or later versions are supported for backup.
On demand backups are retained for up to three days. Check your expiration date.
On demand backups are identified as created by someone other than System and by the presence of Edit | Delete | Restore in the details section. System backups only have Restore.
In previous releases, you could create SLAs only for case records. With CRM Online 2016 Update 1 and CRM 2016 SP1, you can now create enhanced SLAs for entities that are enabled for SLA. A system administrator or customizer can enable SLAs for the following entities and also for custom entities and custom activities:
Account
Contact
Order
Invoice
Quote
Opportunity
Lead
All activity entities like email, phone, and appointment except recurring appointment and its instances.
To enable SLA for custom entities you can select Enable for SLA option in the entity.
once the entity is published you can configure SLA using the same steps we used for case, system will ask for the related entity at the time of SLA creation .
Please note that only enhanced SLA is available for custom entities , standard SLA can be used only with case entity.
To create see how to configure SLA please follow the link :Define SLA
To add a timer control to the form please follow : Add Timer
