PowerApps or as the new name for it is, Canvas driven Apps, is a very fast low/no-code way of creating applications that can fill in the blanks where Dynamics 365 CE sometimes fit. Can for instance be when there is a mapping entity, a complex calendar functionality or even integrations with a camera or other applications directly. These things can be done, some are even supported within the new UI/UCI if you are running it through the tablet/mobile client. However, there is currently no easy way that I have found to just add a PowerApp/Canvas Drive App (I will just call it PowerApp below to make things easier) to Dynamics. But after a chat with my friend, ex MVP and now Microsoft Global Black Belt Carsten Groth (isn’t that a cool name for a team by the way?) he told me that it is possible to embed PowerApps. So I googled a bit a found that no one seemed to have blogged about this (if you have, please tell me in the comments) except for other it concerning other applications like SharePoint. I tried it out and found that it wasn’t that hard at all to embedd a PowerApp into Dynamics 365.
The first thing we have to start with is to create our PowerApp. You can get to this place by browsing to https://web.powerapps.com or clicking the waffle in Office365 and then selecting PowerApps. In my case, I used the Dynamics 365 template and pointed to the Case Entity and did more or less pressed Next-next-finnish. I did replace the field that was shown in the first screen from the Guid of the case to the field “title” as that makes a little bit more sense looking at.
So what I was looking for when creating the PowerApp was the AppId, in this case: “904e3ac1-1e26-4b4b-a384-971485f6709c“
What we then need is the embedding syntax for PowerApps which is: <iframe src=”https://web.powerapps.com/webplayer/iframeapp?source=iframe&screenColor=rgba(104,101,171,1)&appId=/providers/Microsoft.PowerApps/apps/[AppId]” />
You need to replace the [AppId] with your AppId. Also, if you do not specify it, the iframe it will typically render rather small so I would recommend either setting the size of it directly with width and height attributes or using css, the latter being more kosher.
I tried setting an Iframe directly with this in Dynamics 365, but that didn’t seem to work. All I got was a spinner like this:
Spinner which never stops when tried to add PowerApp directly
Not sure why this is.
So, I circumvented it and created a very small html-page like this:
This time, when trying the TestPowerApp.html-page from my local drive, the spinner was quickly replaced by this and then by the App
Then I uploaded this file as a webresource to Dynamics.
Create a webresource with the simple html-page pointing to the PowerApp
After uploading it, in the WebResource screen, you can test the page by clicking on the URL. It should show a webpage with the PowerApp.
The PowerApp running as a webresource in Dynamicws 365
Now you can use this web resource wherever you want. Like directly in a sitemap:
Added PowerApp webresource to the Marketing Area as a Subarea called “Power App Cases”
It should be possible to send parameters to the PowerApp as well making them context aware so that we can create PowerApps that for instance show up within a case and show specific data on that case after you have selected it in Dynamics 365. However, if you look at the iframe syntax you will see that the AppId and stuff is already a parameter and I need to research this a bit more to be able to figure it out. I think that the html web resource probably has to shuffle the query string parameters from Dynamics to PowerApps. I will leave this hanging and hope that someone else in the community catches this ball! Otherwise I will try to figure it out later.
As CDS (common data service) and Modular Driven Apps are the same thing as Dynamics 365, just with less sugar on top, this technique can be used there as well.
If you find anything unclear or have any questions, please leave a comment (moderated).
Gustaf Westerlund MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB www.crmkonsulterna.se
I haven’t found a link to the admin portal from the instance manger or any other place in O365 or Dyn365 yet so I have just created a bookmark for it, so I suggest you do the same.
Also, as I am a frequent Microsoft Support user, and often have customers with many instances, I have tried to consolidate many instances into one ticket. They don’t want that. Better to create one ticket for each instance. (probably gets someone a higher salary too :)) However, I did notice that there seems to be some duplicate detection going on, so try to avoid using the same “Issue Summary” for several tickets – as that will just make the later ones disappear without any error message (hint Microsoft, please fix this! – at least give a decent error message).
In order to create tickets, you need to be either O365 Global Admin or Dynamics 365 Service Administrator. There might be some other admin as well that has the right to create tickets, but I don’t think so.
Gustaf Westerlund MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB www.crmkonsulterna.se
If you are using Dynamics 365 Online, Dynamics 365 Support is your IT-department for your Dynamics system and you need to know or start learning how to working with them in a good way. There are several things you should consider.
Registering a support ticket
First of all, registering a support ticket is of course important. This might not be as trivial as it seems, as it depends on which type of license you have. If you have bought your licenses using CSP (Cloud Service Provider) or Select/Volume Licensing then you will most probably be directed to your CSP/Select partner for any support issues. You can of course buy premier support from Microsoft but that might not always be an option for smaller companies. There are some tricks as well if you are stuck with CSP/Select or similar, and will be happy to tell you about these in person if I meet you, but I won’t write about them, as I am afraid it will be “fixed” which would be sad.
If you have bought your licenses directly through the O365 portal, you can also create a ticket using the portal. You need to be a Global Admin or a Dynamics 365 Service Admin to place a ticket. Currently you cannot indicate that the ticket is for Dynamics so you simply write so in the text and the O365 support team will create a new Dynamics 365 ticket for you. I was amazed at how fast the Office 365 support called me after registering a ticket, I think it took less than 1 minute. So I would suggest you choose the option “call me”.
If you have a partner, I strongly suggest that you register them in the Office 365 portal for the Dynamics 365 subscription as Partner of Record (PoR). This will make your company show up in their Microsoft partner portal where they can register a support ticket for you.
Checklist When registering the ticket with Microsoft, there are some things you have to note:
Be polite. Even if your system is slower than sirup in January (a Swedish saying) or nobody can log in, you will not be getting any help faster by screaming or being rude. I like to quote my grandfather who had a good saying: “Better to be strong in argument and withheld in words, than the other way round.” I have actually gotten written compliments for being nice by the support people, do you think they will go the extra mile for me?
Be very exact with what is you think is wrong. The best way is to formulate it like this: “I did X and expected Y but I got Z”. Also be clear on when you define the case as closed. This is particularly important, and hard when you have performance issues or intermittent errors. But try to be as exact as you can. For example: “When users run Chrome open a Contact (after the contact form already has been loaded for another record) it takes 10 seconds. We expect it to take no more than 2 seconds.”
Only have one issue per ticket. Better to have many tickets open. I have had 4 tickets open for one single customer at the same point in time.
If you think the issue is important, describe it in business impact terms. For example “The bug X affects all sales people in the organization effectivly stopping them from using Dynamics 365. It severly risks our entire Dynamics 365 investment as users look at other solutions and the user adoption drops dramatically and the trust in the system is drastically lowered for every hour this bug is not fixed. We have 4354 sales people in our global sales organization spread out over 34 countries. It also affects managements abilities to manage the company as no pipleline and forecast numbers are produced which could potentially cause sever business damages that cannot easily be fixed within the coming 4-5 years.” – This was just made up 🙂 but it is important to not hold back when doing this, especially if you are Swedish or from other cultures which value humbleness.
Be clear on limits of the error.
Which Operating system?
Which browsers?
What times? Can you see any clear patterns on when it happens?
Geos?
Security roles?
Types of users affected, AD users federated to O365 or Cloud users?
How long?
Which versions of Dynamics 365 are you running?
Which instances have the issue (the url:s)?
Types of tickets
What types of tickets can be registered? Should you only register a ticket when you want help with something?
Well, no, you can and should register a ticket for many different reasons. As I mentioned at the top of the article it is important to think about Microsoft Support as your Dynamics 365 IT-department. They will help you with a lot of things that your IT-department would have helped you with had they hosted your Dynamics system. The main difference is probably that they do nothing else than host Dynamics 365, every day, year after year… not many IT-departments that can compare with that.
Typical issues they can help out with are:
Something seems to have stopped working that used to work, and you didn’t change anything. Like you cannot create an Application User anymore.
Something clearly is a bug in Dynamics 365 and you want Microsoft to know about it (they might not know) and you want to let them know how important it is for you (they will surely not know this).
You need some information from the Server, like the “Top 10 table Usage” report from the SQL database.
You have performance issues.
You need to change the planned upgrades because your team won’t make the set time.
You want to set some non-clustered indexes on the database.
You are doing a migration of large amounts of data and you will be a bad neighbour for a few days and if possible you would like a little more than the 2 allocated threads in the API.
You want a database copy prepared for installation into an on-prem equivalent.
You need some detailed information on how the service is managed, like
How backups are stored
How to restore backups from the 90 day tape backup
Where an instance is hosted
You would like to move an instance to another datacenter
You need to remove a managed solution but it has dependencies that shouldn’t be there…
You need to do some task with an instance that you cannot do yourself with the instance manager.
In other words, they will be your superfriend when working with Dynamics 365 and you want to be really nice to your super friend!
Gustaf Westerlund MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB www.crmkonsulterna.se
As many of you probably have noticed version 9.0 has just been released. If you havn’t, spin up a trial by clicking here: New Trial
It has a very nice and shiny UI which I really think you should try and some very other very nice new features. However, you should be a bit wary of using it in production environments just yet as there seems to be a bit too many serious bugs as described in this document:
I am working with a customer and we have a specific non-production instance we call “sandbox” which we use to test apps and features outside of the ALM (application lifecycle management) process, so we installed v9 or July Update as it is called and tried it out.
What I found when trying to deploy our unmanaged customization with all the entities which we have changed in the project, was that I got the weirdest error, it complained that it was missing an internal Microsoft Web Resource with the name of: “CampaignActivity_main_system_library.js”
So, I opened up the customization.xml (yes, all you oldtimers from CRM 3.0 time remember it as the true export file) and searched for the guid and the web resource name in the file. I found that it was actually used on the main form of Compaign Activitiy, and if you look at the read-me document I have linked above, it mentions that the Campaign Activity is one of the entities which does not work. Hence, there is probably some old code in there that Microsoft have decided to remove, and havn’t had time to replace.
So, the temporary fix to get our solution to work in Dynamics 365 v9.0 (July Release), go into the customization.xml and then manually remove all <Event> tags which include that webresource, and if the <Events> tag was empty, remove that too. Then put the customization.xml file back into the solution file and reimport it.
The campaign activity still won’t work but at least our solution imported. Perhaps there are similar issues with other entities.
I will expect this issue to go away very soon.
And on the issue of if it is ok and supported to manually edit (hack) the customization.xml file I am under the impression that it is as long as it actually import into a system without any forceful shoehorning as it is up to Dyn365 to validate it.
On monday, I will be heading to CRM UG Summit in Nashville which is sure to be a great trip. I am planning to try to make some video there which I will post here and on my Youtube, and don’t miss my session on if it is really is a fair fight to compare Online with Onprem? Guess what I will say?
Gustaf Westerlund MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB www.crmkonsulterna.se
When authenticating to Dyn 365 with S2S the following is a simple program using the S2S authentication which core I think I got originally got from my pal George Doubinski. I like to use it to test S2S. Very clean and easy to build on. string organizationUrl = “<org url>”;string clientId = “<client id in Azure>”;string appKey = “<secret for the clientid>”;string aadInstance = “https://login.microsoftonline.com/”;string tenantID = “<contoso or whateveryouhave>.onmicrosoft.com”; ClientCredential clientcred = new ClientCredential(clientId, appKey);AuthenticationContext authenticationContext = new AuthenticationContext(aadInstance + tenantID);AuthenticationResult authenticationResult = authenticationContext.AcquireToken(organizationUrl, clientcred);var requestedToken = authenticationResult.AccessToken;
using (OrganizationWebProxyClient sdkService = new OrganizationWebProxyClient(GetServiceUrl(organizationUrl), false)){sdkService.HeaderToken = requestedToken;OrganizationRequest request = new OrganizationRequest(); WhoAmIResponse response = sdkService.Execute(new WhoAmIRequest()) as WhoAmIResponse;
Console.WriteLine($”UserID:{response.UserId}”);Console.WriteLine(“Press any key to continue…”);Console.ReadKey();
} However, the line: AuthenticationResult authenticationResult = authenticationContext.AcquireToken(organizationUrl, clientcred);
Cloud computing – isn’t it great?
Requires ADAL version 2.x and the method AquireToken has been removed in the later version of that library.
If you look around the net, many advocate staying on 2.x version of the library but I didn’t have that option as I was integrating with Dyn 365 Operations and that was using the ver 3.x.
So, to make this work in version 3.x you just have to make a simple fix:
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