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Why I love Kingswaysoft

by gustaf | Aug 11, 2020

The reason I often recommend Kingswaysoft over other methods of data migration or even sometime data integration is rather simple, it can do what others can’t. Not even Microsoft. And it can do it fast.

So have I been payed by Kingswaysoft to write this? No, not a penny, I havn’t even been given a free license even though they might if I asked. I think it is just fair that I explain why I am such a strong proponent for this product and if anyone disagrees, please feel free to drop a comment below.

API knowledge

Kingswaysoft both know how the API:s of the Power Platform/CDS/Dataf??x (called CDS below) work, sometimes even better than Microsoft themselves as I have seen feedbacks given in such detail from them on what is missing from specific API:s to reach feature parity, that it is scary. Kingswaysoft also has a blog which has details recommendations and built in recommendations in the product on how to maximize performance with the Dataflex API. They have also built in handling for throttling, multi-threading, batching and more to just make it transparent. When looking at other integration products and connectors. I have never seen anything that is close to this depth.

Datamodel and Dynamics knowledge

Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service and other first party apps have some very peculiar oddities that need to be taken into consideration. These oddities range from for example:

How to delete Marketing List members – by using the party member and list as key
How audit logs are handled
How Activities work, with activity pointer and activity parties
Setting CreatedOn/CreatedBy/ModifiedOn/ModifiedBy
Reading/Writing personal views (saved advanced finds)
Setting statusvalues of some fringe entities

Even though many tools, like Power Automate, Data Flows, Azure Data Factory, etc. all seem to handle common tasks like creating or reading a contact or account rather well, it soon becomes a problem when you start looking at some of the areas above. And you often need to in a migration.

It can use the power of SSIS

SQL Server Integration Services is a very powerful framework once you start getting your head around it. Yes, it has some quirks to it but in general it can do some rather cool things and is good when you want to sequence many different tasks in order to reduce overall runtime. Using built in features like Cache Transforms with memory storage, you can make filters using memory based lookups with millions of records super fast, once everything is loaded.

…and extend it

And of course Kingswaysoft didn’t settle for just building connectors to Dynamics 365. They have a pack called “Productivity Pack” that adds a lot of nice features to SSIS that makes your day a lot easier.

And if you have problems – great support

And if you ever run into problems, their support is great. We have identified buggs and they have fixed the bug and sent us a special deploy just a day or two after.

Flip side

There is always a flip side. I think one is that SSIS isn’t always your most stable product. For this I don’t think Kingswaysoft are to blame but it affects their product experience none the less.

Another obvious flip side is that this requires a skillset that is a bit “off the tracks” even though it isn’t super hard to learn the basics, becoming really proficient with SSIS takes time.

Finally

So, a product as good as this is probably super expensive, right? No. It isn’t. If you are running things from within Visual Studio, then you don’t even need a license, but if you plan to run a migration or so, I certainly recommend one anyway, to get access to support. And buy the Ultimate license to get access to the productivity pack and all the other connectors while you’re at it. It is worth it.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that the other products are bad. I am just saying that once you choose a product, you will start to decend the rabitts hole. If the product isn’t up to speed you will have a couple of options:

Back up and redo with another technology
Patch with another technology
Create some kind of workaround

Neither of these solutions is rather palatable. Hence it is often tempting to choose a product that you know can do the job. And apart from coding, SSIS with Kingswaysoft will very seldom have any issues.

Forms Pro Flow activity set regarding

by gustaf | Jun 17, 2019

Forms Pro is an awesome new tool that combines the datamodel support that we previously got from Voice of the Customer (VoC) with the look and feel from Office Forms. It also has nice native support for Flow and many other parts of the Power Platform. It is still in Preview, make sure you check it out. A great resource for this is Megan Walkers blog as she has written several artice about this.

One thing that we recently ran into with the new Flow activitiy that can generate personalized sendouts, was how to format the syntax of the regarding field. The reason for the confusion is that it is different than how the Common Data Service (CDS) connector handles the Regarding field, which is with two fields, one for the object id and one for the type. In Forms Pro, it is all in one field in the syntax

<objecttypename> objectid

as can be seen in the picture below.

You can actually get a hint about the syntax if you check the “mouse over”. I wasn’t able to screen capture it.

I want to give a great thanks to Megan Walker and this article for giving me this insight!

Formating Web API query for getting VoC Survey questions

by gustaf | Dec 2, 2018

Working with a Flow to do some text analysis and sentiment analysis on Voice of the customer responses.

The trick, as the payment model is per run, is to trigger it per Survey Response, and not Question Response. Hence the logic has to loop through all the question responses.

The way you create a filter in Flow for the query is to use Odata filters. However, I found that these were a casing nightmare, which those of you who have worked with more, probably also have noticed.

After troubleshooting a lot with different queries in the browser I finally found that the following actually worked. Note that you will have t change the guid to your own.

https://contoso.api.crm4.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/msdyn_questionresponses?$select=msdyn_name,msdyn_SurveyResponseId&$filter=msdyn_SurveyResponseId/msdyn_surveyresponseid%20eq%20460279E7-2AF2-E811-A97F-000D3AB0C08C

The tricky part, as you can see, is that the first part of the lookup attribute, is defined in camel-case and the one in the related entity (Survey Response) in lower case.

The part you need in the Flow is the last part, but it is useful to test it directly in the browser to make sure you get the syntax correct.

Its the filter part of the query that you are to enter into the “Filter query” field, and make sure to make it dynamic. 🙂

And this is how it looks in Dynamics 365 CE if you check out the fields. I like to look at them in the list view as I can see the schema name there, which isn’t visible in the Form.

msdyn_SurveyResponseId Lookup from the Question Response Entity. As you can see it seems to be using the Schema name above.

This is the primary field Survey Response. Do note the subtle difference between the fields, that Id is spellt with a capital “I” in the Schema name. Based on the information above, it hence seems to be using “Name” to indicate the field.

Hence based on the above, the supposition would be that the syntax is <Schemaname of the lookup>/<name of field in target entity>

I then did a query to business Unit and I was very surprised to find that it was rather inconsistent and looked like this:

https://contoso.api.crm4.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.1/businessunits?$select=cntso_organizationbaseurl&$filter=parentbusinessunitid/businessunitid%20eq%20null

with just the query that would be

parentbusinessunitid/businessunitid eq null

Let’s have a look at the fields in Dynamics:

The Parent Business Unit Lookup in Business Unit (Self Referential). Note that the Schema name is Pascal Case.

key field, businessunitid in Business Unit

And as you can see, if we were to follow the syntax set by the example above, this should be:

ParentBusinessUnitId/businessunitid

However, that didn’t seem to work, and as a pragmatist, I have to conclude, somewhat sad, that this doesn’t seem to be very consistent.

My recommendation is hence when working with this:

Do not take any casing for granted
<Schemaname of the lookup>/<name of field in target entity> is probably correct for most custom fields/entities.
Many older entities and fields, like the businessunit shown above, has been there since CRM 1.0 or at least 3.0, if I remember correctly and hence the syntax might be different.
Test your queries directly in the browser like I have shown above.

Good luck with your Flows.

And if you know Swedish, make sure you check out my colleague Martin Burmans article on Flow as well. Not sure how well it turns out in translation. https://www.crmkonsulterna.se/flow-i-medvind/

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Embedded PowerApp in Dynamics 365 CE

by gustaf | Jun 16, 2018

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:

<html>

<body>

</body>

</html>

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).