PowerPlatform – Page 5 – Nishant Rana's Weblog

Cleaning up the ActivityPointBase to free up storage– Dataverse / Dynamics 365

In one of our environments, the ActivityPointBase table was occupying nearly 20 GB. It was earlier 40 GB, and we then deleted email records to bring it down to 20 GB.

On downloading the table details, we did not get a clear idea of what activity-type table was occupying that much space.

So we raised the Microsoft Support ticket, and they shared with us the breakdown of records occupied by different activity type tables.

Then we configured our Bulk Deletion Job to delete the corresponding activity type records.

This helped us to bring down the ActivityPointerBase from 20 GB to 15 GB.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/capacity-storage

Hope it helps..

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Date Time Fields (Date Only and User Local – Behaviour) in Power Automate (Dataverse)

Recently we faced an issue in our flow that was showing a different date that the date entered by the user for a date time field.

Let us look at the below scenario to understand it.

Say we have the below field Date and Time with Time Zone Adjustment as User Local created in CRM / Dataverse.

Now user enters the below value in in the field and saves the record which triggers the flow.

The user’s time zone is set as below

Now in our Power Automate flow, we can see the UTC date for it.

2023-08-27T20:00:00Z

Now to convert to the user’s New Zealand Time Zone we can make use convertTimeZone function here

convertTimeZone(triggerOutputs()?[‘body/cr0e8_mydatetimefield’],’UTC’, ‘New Zealand Standard Time’, ‘MM/dd/yyyy’)

We get the date as expected i.e. 28^th

Now let us change the Format of the field to Date Only, and we keep the Time zone adjustment as User Local only.

Let us trigger the flow again. (now we don’t have the time part)

We get the date without time part as expected.

But this time the convertTimeZone
function doesn’t work, as we only have the Date part and it is not in the UTC format.

convertTimeZone(triggerOutputs()?[‘body/cr0e8_mydatetimefield’],’UTC’, ‘New Zealand Standard Time’, ‘MM/dd/yyyy’)

Check this thread that talks about it –

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/Dataverse-Date-only-field-is-set-1-day-off-from-original-value/td-p/805859

Here one quick fix could be to change the Time zone adjustment to Date Only or Time zone independent for that field(i.e. no time zone conversion).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/data-platform/behavior-format-date-time-field#date-and-time-column-behavior-and-format

Now triggering the flow again, we get the below values –

as now there is no time zone conversion for that field.

Hope it helps..

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How to – Create an Instant low-code plug-in (Dataverse) (experimental)

Low-code plug-in is a new experimental feature released by Microsoft, for early adopters, not meant to be used in production. As per Microsoft, “the experimental features can change radically or completely disappear at any time“.

There are 2 types of low-code plug-ins we can write – Instant and Automated.

Instant plug-ins are triggered manually and support parameters, whereas automated plug-in as the name suggests, runs when a particular event (create, update, or delete) occurs on a table and they do not support parameters.

As a prerequisite, we need to first install the Dataverse Accelerator

We can install it from Admin Center >> Resources >> Dynamics 365 Apps

Or from the App Source, look for Dataverse Accelerator and click Get in now.

https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/dynamics-365/microsoftpowercatarch.dataversekit1?exp=kyyw

Specify the Environment to start the installation. (Should take around 5 minutes)

Open the Dataverse Accelerator App.

Click on + New plugin for the Instant Plugins

Provide the display name and the description for the plugin, and also select the appropriate solution.

We can specify optional Input and Output parameters along with the Expression that uses Power FX formulas to define the logic for the plugin.

Our sample plugin takes City as the Input Parameter and returns the total number of contact records having that same city.

Save the plugin and click on Test.

Provide the value for the input parameter and click on Run.

We can see the status as Success and the output parameter Result having a value of 4.

This completes our plugin.

Now to use it, click on the Integrate tab.

The tab provide us the required details.

We can copy the Power FX expression and use it inside the Canvas App.

We get the output as expected.

Below we are calling it from within the Power Automate Flow from a Perform an unbound action

The result –

Get more details and Check out the known limitations

Hope it helps..

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Fix – The label ‘ ‘, id: ” already exists. Supply unique labelid values while importing solution – Dynamics 365

Recently while trying to import the solution, we got the below error –

The tab tag was missing the labelid property. Adding it back to the FormXml using FormXml
Manager XrmToolBox plugin fixed it.

Also check – https://nishantrana.me/2022/11/11/adding-contact-insights-account-insights-to-the-form-dynamics-365-marketing/

Hope it helps..

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Using Customer Lookup in Canvas Apps (Dataverse)

For this example, we are taking the Company Name customer lookup column of the contact table.

We start by adding the Customer Name field to the form.

That adds a card to the form, let us add the required controls to get it working

Radio Button, Combo box, and Text Label for the combo box.

Change the Items property of the radio button to show the contact and account option.

Also, change the Layout to Horizontal and Default as Contact.

And set the Items property of the Combo box as below –

Based on the value selected in the radio button, we are setting the Data Source and also applying the Sort and Distinct function to it, along with StartsWith for delegation.

We have also set Allow searching as On for the combo box.

For the Contact option selected –

For the Account option selected –

Also, we can set the OnChange property of the radio button to Reset(comboControl) to clear the selection when the user switches between Contact and Account options.