“Common Data Service” connectors don’t have an “Upsert” action: And it would have been a problem for one of the flows I had to implement recently if not for David Yack who pointed out that Update action will do an Upsert. What?? Well, he was absolutely right, here you go: Have fun folks. And thank… Read More »
Microsoft Dataverse has a somewhat unique interpretation of what a “required” field is. It’s a bit of “do as I say not as I do”. For example, I can’t create an account in the user interface not having “account name” populated (since it’s a required field): But, of course, behind the scene… whether through Excel… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
A few things happened recently which got me thinking about things we usually don’t talk about in the Power Platform world: Steve Mordue mentioned Dunning-Kruger Effect in his recent podcast/blog post: https://stevemordue.com/microsoft-marching-masses-to-peak-of-mt-stupid/ Another fellow MVP, Olena Grischenko, posted this interesting comment on Linkedin: “Doing lots of error handing in Power Automate recently Feels more and… Read More »
There is a strange action in Power Automate which is really not there to do anything other than to help you organize the Flow a little better, it seems: We can use scopes to put other actions in them, so we can, then collapse and expand those scopes this improving the manageability of the Flow:… Read More »