Nishant Rana's Weblog

How to – Upload a file by URL to SharePoint (Power Automate / Dataverse)

Recently we had a requirement to upload a document (pdf) to a SharePoint folder.

We had the URL of the field saved in one of the fields of the Contact table in Dynamics 365 / Dataverse.

Below is our field and the URL in it. (the URL points to the Manual of Fulla 2, one among many awesome products by Schiit)

Below is how our flow looks like

Here we already have Server-Based SharePoint integration enabled. https://nishantrana.me/2023/07/28/based-on-entity-behavior-for-sharepoint-folder-dynamics-365-dataverse/

The flow triggers when there is an update in the File URL field of the contact record.

Next, we are using HTTP action to use the GET method to get the content of the file. As it is a public URL we haven’t specified any Authentication.

Next, we are using Create File action of SharePoint, we have specified the Site Address, Folder Path, File Name, and most importantly the Body of the HTTP action to the File Content property.

On the successful run of the flow,

we can see the document (pdf) uploaded in the SharePoint folder.

Hope it helps..

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Trying out – CreateMultiple bulk operation message (Preview) in Dataverse (Dynamics 365)

As we know now we have the bulk operation messages – CreateMultiple, UpdateMutiple, and DeleteMultiple (only for elastic tables) released with UpsertMutilple coming soon.

The messages allow us to work with records in bulk. Get more details here

And in fact, now we can also write plugins against the CreateMultiple and UpdateMultiple messages. Get more details here

These messages are available for all the custom tables, but not all the standard tables.

To check availability with standard tables

<fetch>
  <entity name="sdkmessagefilter">
    <attribute name="primaryobjecttypecode" />
    <link-entity name="sdkmessage" from="sdkmessageid" to="sdkmessageid" link-type="inner">
      <filter>
        <condition attribute="name" operator="eq" value="CreateMultiple" />
      </filter>
    </link-entity>
  </entity>
</fetch>

Just to quickly try it out, we created 1000 contact records one by one and then used the CreateMultipleRequest in bulk.

We got the time-out error.

Same error message while working with 500 and then 200 records.

Finally, we got success with 100 records.

We should use the bulk message in multiple parallel threads under different application users to improve the performance – https://nishantrana.me/2021/06/08/data-migration-optimum-batch-size-and-threads-for-maximum-throughput-microsoft-dataverse-dynamics-365/

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