Monthly Archives: December 2020

Incremental refresh for the Dataflows which are loading data from SQL to Dataverse

In one of the earlier posts this month I was seemingly unhappy about the missing “incremental refresh” option: https://www.itaintboring.com/dynamics-crm/power-platform-dataflows-have-i-missed-incremental-refresh-option-somehow/ But, having thought about it a bit more, I don’t think it’s such a big issue. Not when working with the SQL data sources, at least. All we really need is a view that will pre-filter… Read More »

Canvas App on the Dashboard – how do we handle application url?

Environment variables can be very helpful in a lot of situations. Here is yet another scenario where I found them very useful the other day. Imagine you have a Canvas Application you wanted to display in a web resource. Maybe even on the dashboard… something like this: The app there is very simple, but it’s… Read More »

Power Automate – how do we check if a property exists in the object?

Every now and then, I would run into this error: What’s happening there is that I’m going through a list of records, and, occasionally, there is a field that’s not populated. So, in the example above, here is where it fails: That substring function expects a value, but how do we check if the value… Read More »

CDS file/image fields and Power Automate flows

I got a little stuck the other day trying to upload files from Power Automate to a “file” filed in Dataverse – it turned out all the functionality was there, I was simply looking in the wrong place. CDS (current environment) connector has a couple of special actions to work with the file/image attributes: This… Read More »

How to: intercept record assignment and keep it under the same team all the time?

There was a little unusual scenario to cover. With user-owned tables in Dataverse (see, I’m practicing different pieces of new terminology in the same sentence ), how do we keep all records under the same team? You might probably question the scenario to start with, and I’d be happy to just say that there is… Read More »

Building a “dictionary” object in Power Automate Flow

I was toying with the idea of creating a dictionary variable in Power Automate, and, it seems, I got onto something. Unless there is an easier way? Well, just for the sake of experiment, what if we wanted to count the number of accounts per owner in our Dataverse instance and store those numbers in… Read More »

Promote to Admin and Check Access – two buttons we can use to investigate access issues

It might be yesterday’s news (or, at least, it’s probably at least a month old now) that we have “Check Access” button in the model-driven apps: This one is available from the command bar, and it allows us to check record access for any user in the system: It can also track record sharing –… Read More »

Power platform Dataflows – have I missed “Incremental refresh” option somehow?

This month seems to be all about data integration/data migration for me, so, even though I’m still using good old SSIS in many cases, I wanted to look at the Dataflows a little closer. After all, they don’t require any additional deployment/licensing – we just need to go to the maker portal and start building… Read More »

The challenges of using external data in the model-driven applications

Integrating external data with model-driven applications in the Microsoft Dataverse can be a challenging task for a number of reasons: Data volumes Storage costs API throttling and entitlement limits Technology limitations Lack of experience with the tools/technologies Vague requirements where a little change can affect the whole approach to the integration In this post,… Read More »

Virtual Entities Revisited: using embedded canvas app for updates

As you could see in the first post of these series, virtual entities are still alive, Microsoft itself is relying on them for integrations, and we can also do some interesting things with them. In the second post, I walked you through the process of setting up a virtual entity and creating a custom provider.… Read More »