Author Archives: Alex Shlega

Adding CRUD to Virtual Entities

As everybody else has already noticed, CRUD support has been added to the Virtual Entities: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/data-platform/virtual-entities/sample-ve-provider-crud-operations A while ago, I blogged about how we can use canvas apps with virtual entities, and there was a sample plugin there: https://www.itaintboring.com/dynamics-crm/virtual-entities-revisited-setting-up-a-virtual-entity/ So, I figured, I’d just try updating that plugin to support create/update/delete. Since it is, already,… Read More »

Can’t see a model-driven app? Try to activate it

Apparently, model-driven apps may need to be activated now: This is part of the ALM updates released recently: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/key-alm-updates/ Somehow, there seem to be a bit of inconsistency there. For example, as of writing this blog post, when I created an app through the classic designer, for instance, it’s did not show up in the… Read More »

Have you visited preview version of the maker portal lately? There is solution treeview there

If there is any single feature I’ve been missing ever since new maker portal started to take over from the classic solution designer, it’s the treeview. However, have you visited preview version of the maker portal lately? Some things are definitely brewing there, and one of them is new solution experience which brings back… right,… Read More »

Taking a crash course on Power BI, part 2

In the previous post, I started to talk about my recent Power BI experiences., but I kind of stopped half way through. There were 3 visualizations on the report, two of them were slicers connected to the date table, and, yet, there was the main visualization which, at that point, was not, yet, filtered by… Read More »

Taking a crash course on Power BI

It’s been a while since I wanted to try using Power BI for something practical. And this is not to say there are no practical applications for Power BI It’s all about me being a Power Platform consultant who is working primarily with model-driven applications, and, every now and then, with Power Automate and Canvas… Read More »

Creating a Business Process Flow for multiple entities

Business process flows can definitely help guide our application users – they always look nice in the demos, and they easily draw positive feedback. But, it seems, when the BPF is designed to cover multiple entities, there are some quirks there. Here is the BPF I wanted to create: There are two entities involved: Main… Read More »

Feature of my day: Version history for Canvas Apps

This is definitely not something new – you’ll find quite a few blog posts on this topic. But if, for some reason, you are not aware of this feature, it might make your day. As it made mine a few months back… and the only reason I’m talking about it now is that, well, it’s… Read More »

Let’s show an image on the Power Apps Portal form, too

In the previous post, I wrote about how we can use Dataverse image columns in the Power BI Paginated reports (or in the SSRS reports for that matter). What kept bugging me is whether we could actually use a Power Apps Portal to surface that image. Turned out that is not doable, at least not… Read More »

Paginated Power BI / SSRS reports and Dataverse image columns

With the image columns in Dataverse, we can easily add fields to store images directly in the tables like this: This is great, since this makes all those images/documents much easier to identify than if they are stored in Sharepoint. In terms of storage, those images are stored in the file storage which is cheaper… Read More »

“When an item is created” SQL trigger in Power Automate

There is a SQL Connector in Power Automate, and it has couple of triggers which are dependent on the IDENTITY/ROWVERSION columns in SQL: The existence of those two columns in the table is a pre-requisite for the trigger to work: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/sql/#when-an-item-is-created-(v2) There is a catch there, though, and I probably would not know about it… Read More »