Nishant Rana's Weblog

Use Geolocation Settings for Location Tracking and Auditing – Dynamics 365 Field Service

We can track the different locations Field Service technicians have traveled or where they are at a given time inside Dynamics 365 Field Service. Field Service Technicians can enable location sharing from the app, and based on the Geolocation Settings configured, we can see the technician’s location in the schedule board and also list location history through the Geolocation Tracking record.

Navigate to Settings >> Geolocation >> Geolocation Settings.

By default, the Geolocation Settings will have Enable Location Tracking as No and Refresh Interval as 60 seconds.

Below we have updated the Geolocation Settings, updated the Refresh Interval to 120, and specified Tracking times for Monday to Friday, 24 hours.

Refresh Interval specifies how frequently the system will check the user’s location, not the frequency for the creation of “Geolocation Tracking” records.

Geolocation Tracking records are created on Sign In, when a user moves more than 200 meters, and when the user comes to a still position after moving.

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In the Field Service App, the technician has the location enabled in the settings.

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Back in the Schedule Board, we can see the current location of the Field Service technician. (If we are specifying the Start / End location as the Resource Address for the Bookable resource, we will have to specify the latitude and longitude for the associated resource record)

Below we can see the corresponding Geolocation Tracking records created.

Get more details on Location Auditing.

Hope it helps..

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Fix the trigger – Microsoft.OData.ODataException: A binary operator with incompatible types was detected. Found operand types ‘Edm.Guid’ and ‘Edm.String’ for operator kind ‘Equal’ (Power Automate / Dataverse)

Recently in one of our flow triggers – When a row is modified (Dataverse), we got the below error

Exception parsing _msdyn_billingaccount_value eq ‘a84c5028-ecdf-ed11-a7c7-00224893b2b0’ submitted for attribute filterexpression of callback registration. Target entity: msdyn_workorder. Exception: Microsoft.OData.ODataException: A binary operator with incompatible types was detected. Found operand types ‘Edm.Guid’ and ‘Edm.String’ for operator kind ‘Equal’.

This is because we were using single quotes around the GUID value in the Filter rows property.

We need to remove the single quotes around the GUID

GUIDs are considered a primitive data type in OData and should be represented as raw values without quotes. By removing the single quotes, we’ll ensure that the GUID is treated as a valid identifier in our filter condition.

Hope it helps..

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Portal does not load and displays “Server Error” or shows “Getting set up.. This might take a while” message -Portal Startup Issue (PowerApps Portal)

While trying to create a Website with Template – Partner Portal,

we observed the provisioning stuck at – Getting set up…

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Also, it was showing the below error on checking the Site Health.

“URL of the Dynamics 365 organization connected to this portal has been changed.” Which wasn’t the case as the URL of the organization was correct.

Usually, the 1st Web Site takes time around an hour and then any new website is provisioned within 15-20 minutes (as the common / base solutions are already installed). This was the first website for that environment, however, when it was more than 24 hours, we then raised a Microsoft Support Ticket for it.

Microsoft acknowledged this as a bug and also got the fix ready, but there was a delay in deploying it because of dependencies internally.

In parallel, they also provided us with a workaround, which fixed the issue for us.

The steps are as follows –

Create Web Site with the Customer Self-Service Portal template.
Create Web Site with the Partner Portal template.

If Customer Self-Service Portal is not needed, the website can be deleted then, followed by deleting the below Managed solutions specific to Customer Self-Service.

CustomerPortal (Dynamics 365 Portals – Customer Self-Service Portal)
MicrosoftPortalAutomate (Dynamics 365 Portals – Automate)
MicrosoftPortalEnhancedDMMigration (Dynamics 365 Portals – Enhanced DM Migration)
PortalSitewide_RPServiceApp (PortalSitewideRPServiceApp)

Also delete the website records created specific for Customer Self – Service Portal – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9jeWaO93IM&ab_channel=EngineeredCode

We followed the above steps and got the Website with the Partner Portal template created successfully.

Hope it helps..

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Versioning and Drafts for Solution-based Cloud Flows – Power Automate

We now have the version support for Cloud Flows in Power Automate.

This feature is only available in the new editor.

Let us start by creating a simple flow, the creation part will happen in the existing editor.

Let us save the flow, and select Edit >> Details in a new tab to open it in the new designer inside Power Automate Maker Portal

We can see the below different commands in the new designer

Version History
Save Draft
Publish

Below we have made changes to the flow and clicked on Save Draft.

Clicking on Save Draft changes the flow to Draft and shows the message “We saved your draft flow. You can test and run it after you publish”

From the Version History, we can see the Latest Version, Published Version, and the Past Published version, with the option to Restore it.

We can save a draft of a flow even with errors now.

Check for more details – Draft and Versioning for Cloud Flows

Hope it helps..

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What will happen on changing the password of the user account used as the Owner of Cloud Flow and for Connection – Power Automate

Recently we had to change the password of the user account being used as an owner of the cloud flows as well as the used for connection/connection reference.

So we tried it on a trial environment first, below is our flow that runs every 5 minutes and creates a contact record (Dataverse), sends an email (Office 365 Outlook), and creates a file (SharePoint) owned by the same account along with the connection reference.

Below is our cloud flow

We can see the details around Connection References and Owner. We can also see it running successfully getting triggered after every 5 minutes.

Now let us update the password of the account that is being used in the flow.

Interestingly after password change our Flow kept running successfully without any errors.

Contact records are created in the Dataverse.

Mail sent using the Send an email action.

Files getting uploaded using the Create file action of SharePoint.

Also, we see the status of the connections showing as Connected.

It could be because Power Automate might be using cached credentials for a certain period after the password change, and/or the connections that use the refresh tokens to maintain authentication, have their tokens still valid.

https://www.itaintboring.com/powerapps/why-is-that-flow-still-working-after-i-have-changed-my-password/

Here what we can do immediately after changing the password is open the connections and click on Switch Account, sign in again using that account. That will referesh the connection.

That is exactly what we did for our Prod and other environments after we updated the password and we didn’t face connection failed issues or any other error for all our exiting flows.

Also, check – https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/290700/what-will-happen-to-the-ms-flow-connectors-if-their-usernames-password-got-reset

Using Service Principal in Power Automate – https://benediktbergmann.eu/2022/01/04/setup-a-service-principal-in-power-automate/

https://www.dynamicpeople.nl/en/news/service-principals-power-automate/

Hope it helps..

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Using Focused view in Dynamics 365

Focused view in Dynamics 365 that allows users to view and manage all their records in one place, allowing them to be more productive, as they can stay on track and avoid getting sidetracked by switching between multiple screens to find the information they need.

We can enable and disable it for all the records from the Power Platform Admin Center