For those of you that follow me on twitter and other media, I recently posted out a few questions to trigger some conversation about code. Specifically it was JavaScript code for a functional consultant. The feedback was extremely varied, and that was my hope. I of course have an opinion on the matter, but didn’t want to voice it before I heard what people in general feel about the subject.
This is only from my twitter, but had a similar thing on the Dynamics group of Facebook. There are not a lot of votes here, but in general it’s fair to conclude that most don’t agree with me in regards to Dynamics 365 JavaScript.
I personally think that functional consultants need to know BASIC JavasScript for Model Driven Apps. Examples of basic to me is the Hide/Show with potentially a few calculations. The obvious reason for this is the user expecting to se changes in the app visually while they are entering data. Having things calculated asynchronous is just not good enough when working in a Model Driven App.
But JavaScript doesn’t run server side. You cant use that!
Someone
True, but sometimes the code doesn’t need to be server side, because we can guarantee that the usage is being done within the app. Other times integrations might directly update data and the scenario might be different. The point I am trying to make, is that you should be able to choose the technology because you know how to do it. Not choose the tech based on what your limitations are. There are way to many implementations that are absolutely chaos taking over because of Business Rules, Calculated Fields or Formula Column bombardment.
But I’m not a developer??!?🤷♀️
Well.. Is that really true? I hope you don’t mind me quoting you Steve, but I 100% agree with you on Code is Code. I know you are referring to the idea that this should be done by dev’s, but what would life be if we all agreed on everything? hehe.
I see tons of functional consultants accepting that PowerFX in Canvas Apps is just “Excel formula”. Looking at the example below of an update statement….. How is this not ProCode?
How is this any easier than JavaScript if you just look at syntax for a hide/show?
I understand that these are to absolutely different functions, but the whole idea of accepting PowerFX as a Low-Code language should mean that you also accept JavaScript to be a Low-Code language.
These to languages are so extremely different in logic. My mind is made up of sequences of actions, and that’s why JavaScript makes sense, while PowerFX in Canvas is the result of whatever happened in a prior action(and that fries my brain sometimes).
But JavaScript it’s to hard to learn!
Nothing is harder than learn to do Canvas Apps correctly. I have been doing it on and off for years already, and I still feel like I am a terrible app developer in Canvas. You all know I am from the Dynamics background and wish most things would be in the context of a Model Driven App. I accept that I am not a creative person, and that a button is a good button as long as it works (not because of rounded corners😂).
JavaScript is just something that you have to do a few times in a test environment and you will quickly see that it’s a lot simpler than you actually thought. Most of the stuff being done in JavaScript these days is hide/show’s and simple calculations. The heavy JavaScript’s that we used to see have in many cases been replaced with other tech (Custom Pages, PCF Components etc).
Later this year I will try to release a YouTube course “JavaScript 4 Dummies, by a Dummie”. It will be my take on simple JavaScript, and I will make sure that everyone will understand the basic principles of HowTo JavaScript.
🙃BUT UNTILL THEN🙃 I am actually going to record a series on “Plugin’s for Dummies, by a Dummie”. Wonder if people will accept a Plugin as Low-Code?!???! haha.. Don’t worry.. It’s Pro-Code, but it’s not impossible now that we have GPT to help us out with syntax! More info to come👏❤
This might be the dumbest blog in a while, but I am adding it in case others have problems with the same issue.
Recently I needed to add new products to the product table of Dynamics, and the buttons for adding the products/families were gone.
I of course had to look at the documentation in case there was something obvious I was missing. The documentation only wanted to ensure that I had a license + security role.
All of this was checking out on my side as I had a license and I was an administrator. Still, I was desperate trying to understand such a stupid issue that I made sure I had enough roles:
Eventually, I got some help from friends, and a huge thank you to Vivian Voss for pointing me in the right direction. First I was told to check the “obvious”.
Are you able to configure products via the old UI?
Vivian Voss
Well, turns out I was.
Solution?
Go to the Default Solution of configuration and make sure that “read only” was not on for the product table in the new UI😂😂🤷♂️🤷♀️🤷
The only thing that I can think of is an update from Microsoft changing this value for some odd reason. The fact that it is read-only in the Unified Client makes no sense, but hey. Not the first time something like that has happened.. hehe.
Just make sure this is OFF, Save changes, and then publish the table. You should be able to configure products again.
Did you recently see the update from Power CAT announcing the 3 dev environments pr user?!?! The topic of more than one dev environment has been discussed in several forums over the last years, but finally, it is here. Go check out the video on YouTube about the details:
In short a few key takeaways:
3 Dev environments PR user
2 GB of data pr environment (does not count against storage)
Premium Connectors included for testing
ALM setup for getting to know solution management better
Automatic cleanup of environments over time (if inactive).
Or should I say https://make.preview.powerapps.com <- for now:) Depending on when it will be released to everyone, the ability to add environments from make.powerapps portal is not yet rolled out. Go to the PREVIEW make, and you should be able to see it there. This is important for users without access to the admin.powerplatform.com.
Go ahead and try it out and see where the limitations are. The important part here is to learn new things by trying them out. Enjoy!
In just a few days Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge is going to kick off at Soria Moria hotel in Norway. This is a hackathon that gathers the best of the best within Dynamics / Power Platform / Azure / .NET / M365 etc.
The main reason why I haven’t been so active blogging lately about CRM is that this has been my main focus! I am really excited and proud to be a part of the ACDC team💪💯
We have specific themes every year, and this year it’s Pirates
Teams of 3-5 battle for points and glory to win the prestigious ANTLERS
We will be more than 50 people over 3 days gathered at Soria Moria hotel in the wonderful arctic mountains of Oslo. A brilliant team of 5 judges will determine who is victorious.
By now I am sure most of you have heard about ChatGPT. The AI product is pouring out surprisingly intelligent responses to all sorts of questions that people all around the world have given it lately.
There have been examples of the tool writing papers for school, creating blog posts for people, and helping formulate fairly complex text for webpages and marketers. One thing that someone tipped me off about was the ability to write code, and I was a bit curious as to what that would mean.
So one of the many gaps in my knowledge is specifically regarding Plugins. A plugin is a piece of backend code that runs in real time when triggers occur in Dataverse. I tried doing a little plugin with some help a few years ago and wrote about it on the Company Blog – Plugin in 1 hour.
I was curious how ChatGPT would do with a similar issue, so I took it for a spin😊
Question
First off I started out with a question that you write the same way you would anything Google/Yahoo/AltaVista/Bing/AskJeeves/DuckDuckGo/etc etc etc
The response I get is fairly spot on. Certainly, some will comment about something not being 100% accurate here, but this is more than good enough and quite well-written!
This wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, so I asked a follow-up question to my original question.
It thought for a few moments before it started spitting out CODE!! 🤯🤯🤯🤯 (above is just a snip of the total code. I put it all in a code box below).
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Query;
using System;
using System.Linq;
namespace MyPlugins
{
public class SumProductValues : IPlugin
{
public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
{
// Obtain the execution context from the service provider.
IPluginExecutionContext context = (IPluginExecutionContext)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IPluginExecutionContext));
// Obtain the organization service reference which you will need for CRUD operations.
IOrganizationServiceFactory serviceFactory = (IOrganizationServiceFactory)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IOrganizationServiceFactory));
IOrganizationService service = serviceFactory.CreateOrganizationService(context.UserId);
// Retrieve the Opportunity record that the plugin is running against.
Entity opportunity = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];
// Create a query to retrieve the related products.
QueryExpression query = new QueryExpression
{
EntityName = "product",
ColumnSet = new ColumnSet("productid", "price"),
Criteria = new FilterExpression
{
Conditions =
{
new ConditionExpression
{
AttributeName = "parent_opportunity_id",
Operator = ConditionOperator.Equal,
Values = { opportunity.Id }
}
}
}
};
// Retrieve the related products.
EntityCollection products = service.RetrieveMultiple(query);
// Sum up the value of the products.
decimal totalPrice = products.Entities.Sum(product => product.GetAttributeValue<Money>("price").Value);
// Update the Total Price field of the Opportunity record.
opportunity["totalprice"] = new Money(totalPrice);
service.Update(opportunity);
}
}
}
🤯🤯🤯🤯
At this point, I was extremely excited to see that the result is pretty darn good. Sure the trigger here is based on Opportunity, and not the opportunity product, but that is beside the point. It seems that I could have formulated my question in a way that I would have understood it correctly. This is actual usable code for a plugin that could run on Opportunity level to update the sum of all Opportunity products.
Not really sure what more to write about this ATM.. Still trying to wrap my head around it all for now.
Initially, I was just going to explore some possibilities with Custom Pages, but decided to make a solution out of it instead. This way you can just download the solution and do the required modifications for your project (GIPHY API key), and you are good to go😁
I am really excited to hear your feedback after seeing/trying this out, and hopefully, I will be able to make it a lot better in next revisions of the Custom Page!
Go to my GitHub to get a hold of the solution. It’s a pretty “thin” solution that should be easy to configure and easy to delete if you no longer need it.
I have also included a video displaying how you install and use the solution
Installation and setup
Because of ribbon changes, I was forced to create a managed solution for this. The only way it wouldn’t overwrite the current opportunity ribbon.
If you want to play around with the solution, download the unmanaged. Just make sure you don’t have any other ribbon customizations on Opportunity. If you do back it up first!!
For everyone else, you have to download the managed solution to be on the safe side.
On my Gihub page I have written what components get installed, so you can easily remove it all at a later point in time.
Did you think my last post was the final stage of the “Custom Page – Win Notification“? Of course not!! We have one more important step to complete the whole solution.
I am all about salespeople being able to boast about their sales. If you meet a salesperson who doesn’t love to brag about closing, are they even in sales? 😉
Communication is key when you work in organizations of any size and location Onprem/Online/Hybrid. Doesn’t matter where you work, we can all agree that spreading the word around, and making sure everyone gets the latest news is hard. Microsoft is making it pretty obvious that Teams is a preferred channel, so that’s where I also wanted to focus my energy.
Notify the team
I decided to extend the solution a bit to reuse the GIF that we got from the last closing screen, and include it in the Teams integration that I wrote about earlier in the Adaptive Cards.
The first thing I did was to add a new group of fields for the Teams notification. I wanted to let the user choose if they wanted to post the sales to Teams or not. The obvious reason is that some opportunities might have to be reopened, and you don’t want the credit 2 times etc. It’s just a simple logo, text and boolean field.
The next step is adding the variable BoolPostTeams to the run statement of the Power Automate when I click “Confirm Win”.
On the Flow side of things, I will now receive 1 more variable that I can handle. Because I wanted to use the bool type, I have to convert the string “true/false” to a boolean
bool(triggerBody()['Initializevariable2_Value'])
What team are we updating?
Glad you asked 😉 A part of the solution is to include a Team ID and Channel ID. I added these fields to the Business Unit Table. When we store the Teams/Channel ID’s at this level, we can reuse the same solution for several teams in an organization without having to hard code anything.
These are simple text fields that will hold the unique values to the Team and the Channel you want to notify.
NB! A tip for getting the Teams ID and the Channel ID: Add the Team and Channel via the drop-down selector (flow step below). Then open the “peek code” to see what the ID’s of the teams are. If you don’t understand this step, just have a look at my video in the final post of the series 🎥
Back to the flow!
We update the get Opportunity with extra linked tables. This way we don’t have to do multiple retrieves, and only get the fields we need from the linked tables.
After we update the opportunity as closed with our Custom Action “close opportunity”, we check if the close dialog wanted to notify the team.
‘
Then we need to get the @mention tag for the given user that made the sales. Here I am using the email address from the SystemUser table we are getting from the Opportunity extended table.
Finally, we post the Adaptive Card to Teams and behold the wonder of the adaptive card!! 💘
Most of you might know by now that I am a huge fan of GIF’s. I have written about GIF’s earlier when trying to motivate sales people, and I thought I would turn it up one notch!
Last post I wrote was about the opportunity close dialog. It was functional, but not exciting.
It is still 100% more feedback friendly than the Microsoft OOTB functionality, but it’s a little boring now that we have the option to be creative. This is why I thought I would add my earlier GIF post together with this to create a solution for instant response to the salespeople.
We all know that there is no better feeling than finding the correct GIF! 😂
So let’s start off by including a flow that I have written earlier with the Custom Page Confirmation dialog to make it all a little better than the thumbs up that my last post was showcasing.
RUN Instant Flow when completing sales
In the last post we covered the Power Automate action when the confirmation button was pressed. Now we reopen it to add a few more steps. The steps are identical to the steps I have linked to above in the article that coveres GIF connector.
At the end we have to respond to the app with the GIF URL that we want to use. There are many variables that have the same name “URL”, so make sure you find the one that I am using below.
Back to the Custom Page
The “Confirm Win” button now has to do a few more things, so here is the added code.
//Patch the Oppty fields
Patch(
Opportunities,
LookUp(
Opportunities,
Opportunity = GUID(VarOppportunity.opportunityid)
),
{
'Actual Close Date': EstClosingDate.Value,
'Actual Revenue': Int(EstimatedRevenue.Value)
}
);
//Update Opportunity Close entity and retreive GIF
Set(varFlow, CloseOpptyPostTeams.Run(VarOppportunity.Opportunity));
Set(varGIF, varFlow.urlgif);
//Hide input boxes and show confirmation
Set(
varConfirmdetails,
false
);
Set(
varCongratulations,
true
);
Mostly the only difference here is adding 2 variables. 1 that is the actual response from Power Automate (all of the fields), and the other one is setting a variable “varGIF” for use in our new image component that we add on the sales confirmation box.
Let’s check out that GIF!
Add an image to the Congratulations group, and reference the varGIF
Final Product 💘
When the sales person now closes the dialog, they get a 100% more awesome experience than the OOTB version!!! 🏆👍🎉
In the last post, we created a new close dialog, but we didn’t add any logic to the buttons.
Logic – Fields and Buttons
The most important parameter we send in via JavaScript last time was the GUID of the record that we are going to work with.
The first thing we do is add an onload to the app and perform a lookup as the very first step. This will give us all of the data for that given Opportunity that we can use within the Power App. We store the whole record in a variable “varOpportunity”.
A little clever step here is actually the “First(Opportunities)”. For testing purposes, this will open up the first Opportunity in the DB if you open the app without the GUID from Dynamics, and from here you can test the app make.powerapps.com studio without having to pass a parameter to the Custom Page 👍
Fields can now be added via the “varOpportunity” that contains all of the data to the first opportunity in the system.
BUTTONS
The cancel button only has “back()” as a function to close out the dialog, but the “Confirm WIN” has a patch statement for Opportunity.
//Patch the Opportunity fields
Patch(
Opportunities,
LookUp(
Opportunities,
Opportunity = GUID(VarOppportunity.opportunityid)
),
{
'Actual Close Date': EstClosingDate.Value,
'Actual Revenue': Int(EstimatedRevenue.Value)
}
);
//Hide input boxes and show confirmation
Set(
varConfirmdetails,
false
);
Set(
varCongratulations,
true
);
HIDE/SHOW
Because of some challenges I met with multiple screens, I had to use a single Screen with hide/show logic. Therefore I added all the fields to Groups and will hide Show based on groups.
The Congratulations group looks like this.
Closing the Opportunity Challenge
If this were a custom entity we could close the opportunity by setting the Status and Status Reason values. Unfortunately, the Opportunity has a function for closing the Opportunity that will create a Case close dialog. In order for this to work, we have to call a custom service for closing the Case. This does get a bit tricky.
We now have to call an action from Power Automate to close the opportunity as WON. At the moment of writing the blog, the process of calling the Microsoft action in Power Automate wasn’t working, so I created my own action. I will show you how, and honestly maybe even recommend doing it this way for now. It works all of the time and uses the technology that has been working in CRM since 4.0.
Custom Action
Actions work with the same logic as a Workflow, but they can be fired at any time from anywhere. They can receive inputs, and generate outputs. A workflow will only trigger from CRUD events, and work within the context of the record triggering the actual workflow. They are in many ways an underrated function in Dynamics / Dataverse.
It’s a pretty simple step updating the status of the opportunity to “won”, and by doing it this way the system will automatically do the correct calls in the API for Opportunity Close.
This is all you need for the action. After activation, we can go back to the custom page and create a instant flow (Power Automate).
In the Custom Page we now add a line to our “Confirm WIN” button. (Yes, I know we probably should add some logic for success/fail, but that will be a part of the final solution on Github).
//Patch the Opportunity fields
Patch(
Opportunities,
LookUp(
Opportunities,
Opportunity = GUID(VarOppportunity.opportunityid)
),
{
'Actual Close Date': EstClosingDate.Value,
'Actual Revenue': Int(EstimatedRevenue.Value)
}
);
//Hide input boxes and show confirmation
Set(
varConfirmdetails,
false
);
Set(
varCongratulations,
true
);
//Update Opportunity Close entity
CloseOpptyPostTeams.Run(VarOppportunity.Opportunity);
WINNER WINNER 🏆🥇
You should now be able to close the opportunity as won via a custom page. Just remember to publish the custom page AND publish the app again. If not it will now show. Do remember to give it a few moments before refreshing after a change.
I am using Dynamics 365 as an example, but the process will be the same for Power Apps – Model Driven. Only difference is that Dynamics 365 has the Opportunity table that we are wanting to use.
I have also added the simple button setup to Github, if you just want to give it a go. 👉DOWNLOAD SIMPLE BUTTON HERE👈
Creating an app and adding the button
Start off by adding an app to a solution and giving it a proper name. In my case, I am choosing Sales Win, because I am creating a simple app for everyone to see the functionality. You could of course just add this to your existing app if that is what you want to do.
For the tricky part, you need to open the Command Bar. This is essentially Ribbon Workbench jr😉 In time I would only imagine that most of the Ribbon Workbench would be available here, but we are probably still a few years away from a complete transition here.
Choose the main form for this exercise, and then create a new Command. Command is actually a button. Why it’s called Command I’m not sure as we all are used to add buttons to a ribbon🤷♂️
On the right side, you can add an image, and I usually find mine through SVG’s online. SVG’s for download <- a blog post I wrote about the topic. Add this as a webresource.
Now, we are going to have to create some JavaScript. It’s actually the only way to open a Custom Page. The JavaScript is pretty “simple”, and I will provide you with the copy-paste version.
JavaScript
🛑BEFORE YOU STOP READING BECAUSE OF JAVASCRIPT🛑
I will provide the JavaScript you need. Unfortunately, you will still need to understand how to copy-paste some script for stuff like custom pages to work.
The only parameter you have to change here if you are creating everything from scratch is: name: “saleswin_saleswin_c0947” <- replace with the name of your custom page.
function CloseWON(formContext) {
//Get Opportunity GUID and remove {}
var recordGUID = formContext.data.entity.getId().replace(/[{}]/g, "");
// Centered Dialog
var pageInput = {
pageType: "custom",
name: "saleswin_saleswin_c0947", //Unique name of Custom page
entityName: "opportunity",
recordId: recordGUID,
};
var navigationOptions = {
target: 2,
position: 1,
width: {value: 450, unit: "px"},
height:{value: 550, unit: "px"}
};
Xrm.Navigation.navigateTo(pageInput, navigationOptions)
.then(
function () {
// Called when the dialog closes
formContext.data.refresh();
}
).catch(
function (error) {
// Handle error
alert("CANCEL");
}
);
}
This JavaScript opens up a custom page and sends in a GUID parameter (look at PageInput) to use within the page. This is just how Custom Pages work, so don’t try to do any magic here!
It’s important to hide or show the button at the correct times, and that is why you have to add logic. With the following function, the button is only visible when the Opportunity is in edit mode. When creating a new Opportunity you will not see this button.
Self.Selected.State = FormMode.Edit
Add a new page to your solution
A custom page is a lot like a Canvas App, but it’s not exactly the same. Not all functionality is the same as a Canvas App, so you need to get familiar with it first.
The first thing I noticed was the lack of multiple screens.
It seems not impossible to add more screens, but Microsoft has hidden this feature. The reason seems to be related to isolating a Screen to be a specific application. Might make sense, but not for my use case. It does make somewhat sense because a Custom Page can be opened from everywhere within Model Driven Apps. It’s actually not tied to anything (entity) at all. If you need to turn it on: 👇
Please don’t judge this Canvas App ATM. It will only get better over time 😂
I added labels and text boxes without any logic to them yet and added a data source for Opportunities. This is all for the next step of our configuration of the Sales Win dialog.
Last step (maybe the most important one)
We now need to add the custom page to the APP.
Make sure you UNCHECK the “Show in navigation”. Otherwise, you will see this page as a navigation option on the left side like account, contact, oppty etc.
Finally, publish in the ribbon editor
What have we achieved so far?
Once the button is pushed, the Custom Page loads. 🙏👍🎉
CRM Keeper 