PowerPlatform – Page 24 – Nishant Rana's Weblog

Modern Model App designer (preview) – Dataverse (Dynamics 365)

A new Model App designer (preview) was added to the platform recently.

It follows a page-based authoring approach and resembles the new UCI.

Within the Maker Portal, while create an new Model-Driven App, we can select Modern App designer (preview)

Provide the name and description to the app and click Create.

Click on Play to see how the default app looks like

Now let us add the lead and contact entity and some dashboards to it.

Click on New Page

Select Table based view and form. The other option is Dashboard.

Search and select Lead and Contact and leave it checked – Show in navigation option

This adds the form(s) and view(s) for the table selected.

We can click on form and view and can either let all the forms and views selected by default or can specify specific views and forms.

“No forms have been explicitly selected. All forms will be available by default.”

Similarly, we can add a Dashboard

Here we have selected 2 dashboards and kept the option – Show in navigation checked.

We can update the title of the Dashboards added.

From the navigation menu, we can arrange the components added -i.e. move them up and down and as well remove them.

We can also add new Group and also the Subarea of type either Table or Dashboard.

Save and Publish the change and click on Play.

Our App is ready.

Similarly, we can edit an existing App in the new preview designer.

We can also Switch to classic

Our Classic App Designer à

Lastly, the Data section in the new designer allows us to edit our entity/ table.

Hope it helps..

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How to – Enable Notification in Model-Driven App (Dynamics 365)

By making use of appsetting and settingdefinition table, we can enable notifications in the Model-Driven App. (not sure if it is documented somewhere / or supported way) – so try in a trial environment.

I think the supported way is through customization.xml

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/model-driven-apps/clientapi/reference/events/form-onsave#enable-async-onsave-using-app-setting

Thanks to the below post and tweets by Mehdi EL Amri, which describes the steps to be followed.

https://xrmtricks.com/2021/05/26/a-glance-of-the-onload-event-on-a-model-driven-app-form-async-onload-event/

Basically, we need to add a new record inside appsetting table which will have reference to the settingdefinitionid of that particular setting (Alert notification early access) inside settingdefinition table along with id of the app to which we want it to be associated.

Let us get the settingdefinitionid for Allow notification early access.

App Id for the Sales Hub.

Here we are creating a new record through a console application

parentappmoduleid – appid of the model driven app
settingdefinitionid – id of the specific setting
uniquename – name
value – set as true

Now let us create a flow on the creation of contact which will send the notification. (create the notification record)

On creating the contact record, we can see the notification inside our Sales Hub.

Settings allow us to enable/disable toasts and set the toast duration as shown below

Hope it helps..

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Azure Synapse Link / Export to Data Lake Service – Performance (initial sync)

Recently we configured the Export to Data Lake service for one of our projects.

Just sharing the performance, we got during the initial sync.

Entity	Count
Contact	2,36,2581
Custom entity	1,61,3554

The sync started at 11:47 A.M and was completed around 4:50 P.M. – around 5 hours i.e. 300 minutes

Let us consider total records synced as 3975000 – 1613446 + 2362581 + 2 = 3976029.

So the performance here comes down to

795000 records per hour
13250 records per minutes
220 records per second.

Of course, it will vary depending on the specific environment, table / entity type, attributes in it etc. it gives us a rough idea.

Posts on Azure Data Lake

Hope it helps..

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Advanced configuration settings – Azure Synapse Link / Export to Data Lake service (Dataverse/ Dynamics 365)

The Export to Data Lake service now has some Advanced configuration settings available.

To learn more on Export to Data Lake service

https://nishantrana.me/2020/12/10/posts-on-azure-data-lake/

The new settings allow us to configure how the DataVerse / CRM table data is written to Azure Data Lake.

In-Place update or upsert (default)
Append Only

With the in-place update, the default setting, the file will contain the full data set, and any update in the source will update the same in the synced CSV file or the data partition, similarly, any record deleted will delete the row from the data partition, unlike Append Only where a new row will be added in case of both update and delete.

For huge volume of data, Microsoft recommends opting for Append only mode. This mode is also preferable when an organization wants to incrementally review the changed data.

The other option is to define the data partition strategy.

By Month (default)
By Year

With this option, files generated are partitioned by either year or more granular month-wise, which can be specified per-table basis.

Microsoft recommends Monthly partition if data volume is high.

Now, let us see it in action.

For the Lead table, we haven’t selected the option for advanced configuration settings and are going by default.

Append Only – No
Partition Strategy – Month

For contact, we have enabled the advanced configuration settings and opted for Partition Strategy as Year.

For Account , we have opted for Append Only as true, for which the Partition strategy option is disabled and set as Year.

The final configuration à

Within the container inside the Storage Account, we can see corresponding folders created per table/entity along with model.json as shown below.

Let us explore the Lead folder –

We can see 2 CSV created with format YYYY-MM.csv i.e. having the month part in it because we had specified Partition Strategy as Month i.e. the default value.

For Contact and Account, the Pattern Strategy was Year, so we have files generated in format YYYY.csv

Let us update one of the lead records by appending ‘Updated’ in the last name field.

After the successful sync,

we can see the record updated in the .csv / partition.

The same is the case with the contact record.

Now let us update an account record, it had Append Only specified as Yes.

Here we update the Account Name field from Litware to Litware Updated.

After the sync

We can see a new row appended with the updated record along with the original record.

Let us delete the same account record

As expected, being Append Only mode, we can see a new row added for the Litware record.

We have 2 additional rows apart from the original row, one created for update and the other for delete action.

Export to Data Lake service is Microsoft’s recommended way of synchronizing Dataverse Data with external storage, and we can see them continuously investing and adding enhancements to it.

Get all the details here –

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/data-platform/export-to-data-lake#data-partition-strategy

Hope it helps..

Retrieving security role privileges changes (audit) using KingswaySoft’s Dynamics 365 SSIS Integration Toolkit

We can specify Source Type as AuditLogs within the CDS Source Component Editor of KingswaySoft to fetch the Audit information.

Get the details :- https://nishantrana.me/2018/10/08/using-kingswaysofts-cds-crm-source-component-to-get-audit-information-in-dynamics-365-ce-ssis/

The Souce Type – AuditLogs includes Output type – Audit Details (Role Privileges), which can be used to fetch any audit information related to security roles.

Audit Details (Role Privileges) contains 4 columns, which we have mapped to columns in excel.

AuditId
OldRolePrivileges
NewRolePrivileges
InvalidRolePrivileges

Let us execute the package

The output à

Here, the 1st row is when a new security role was created, the 2nd row is when an existing security role was updated and 3^rd row is when a security role was deleted.

To get the complete information we need to combine this information (id which is auditid – first column) with the Primary output.

The columns of the Primary Output

After mapping, let us run the package with the Primary Output type.

Here below we can see the complete details by combining both the output using the auditid column

Note – to get the Audit Details (Role Privileges), we need to use SOAP – Service End Point type.

Also refer –

http://mscrmshop.blogspot.com/2016/06/auditing-security-roles-in-crm.html

http://www.kingswaysoft.com/blog/2019/10/16/Extracting-Audit-Logs-for-Multiple-CRM-Entities

https://nishantrana.me/2018/11/26/ssis-and-microsoft-dynamics-365/

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/mscrmcustomization/posts/ms-crm-audit-database-table-details

Hope it helps..

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Write batch size, data integration unit, and degree of copy parallelism in Azure Data Factory for Dynamics CRM / 365 Dataset

Let us take a simple example where we are moving contact records (.CSV) stored in Azure File Share to Dataverse or Dynamics 365 (UPSERT).

CSV file has 50000 sample contact records (generated using https://extendsclass.com/csv-generator.html) stored in Azure File Storage.

Another option of generating sample data

https://nishantrana.me/2020/05/26/using-data-spawner-component-ssis-to-generate-sample-data-in-dynamics-365/

The Source in our Data Factory pipeline.

The Sink is our Dynamics 365 / Dataverse sandbox environment, here we are using the Upsert write behavior.

For the Sink, the default Write batch size is 10.

Max concurrent connections specify the upper limit of concurrent connections that can be specified.

Below is our Mapping configuration

The Settings tab for the pipeline, allows us to specify,

Data Integration Unit specifies is the powerfulness of the copy execution.

Degree of copy parallelism specifies the parallel thread to be used.

Let us run the pipeline with the default values.

Write Batch Size (Sink) – 10
Degree of copy parallelism – 10
Data integration unit – Auto (4)

The results à It took around 58 minutes to create 50K contact records.

We then ran the pipeline few more times by specifying the different batch sizes and degree of copy parallelism.

We kept Max concurrent connections as blank and Data Integration Unit as Auto. (during our testing even if we are setting it to higher values, the used DIUs value as always 4)

Below are the results we got à

Write Batch Size	Degree of copy parallelism	Data Integration Unit (Auto)	Total Time (Minutes)
100	8	4	35
100	16	4	29
1000	32	4	35

250	8	4	35
250	16	4	25
250	32	4	55

500	8	4	38
500	16	4	29
500	32	4	28

750	8	4	37
750	16	4	25
750	32	4	17

999	8	4	36
999	16	4	30
999	32	4	20

The results show that increasing the batch size and degree of copy parallelism improves the performance in our scenario.

Ideally, we should run a few tests with different combinations before settling for a specific configuration as it could vary.

On trying to set the batch size to more than 1000,

We would get the below error à
ExecuteMultiple Request batch size exeeds the maximum batch size allowed.

Also refer –

Optimizing Data Migration – https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crminthefield/posts/optimizing-data-migration-integration-with-power-platform

Using Data Factory with Dynamics 365 – https://nishantrana.me/2020/10/21/posts-on-azure-data-factory/

Optimum batch size with SSIS –https://nishantrana.me/2018/06/04/optimum-batch-size-while-using-ssis-integration-toolkit-for-microsoft-dynamics-365/

Hope it helps..

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