Dataverse – Page 4 – Nishant Rana's Weblog

When Do We Use the ActivityParty.AddressUsed Property for Emails in Power Automate (Dataverse)

When we automate emails in Dataverse using Power Automate, we deal with something called Activity Party. It manages the participants of an email—whether they are To, CC, BCC, or the Sender. Normally, we use the partyid field to point to a Dataverse record like a Contact, Lead, User, or Queue.

Every participant in an email is stored as a row in the Activity Party table.

Key fields include:

partyid → Reference to the actual record (Contact, Account, User, Queue, etc.)

participationtypemask → Role (1 = Sender, 2 = To, 3 = CC, 4 = BCC)

addressused → The raw email address used

Normally, if a Contact or User is referenced in partyid, Dataverse automatically pulls their primary email.

But there are situations where this is not enough. That’s where addressused becomes important.

Multiple Email Addresses on a Record – A Contact, Lead, or User might have more than one email (work, personal, secondary). By default, Dataverse always uses the primary email field. But if we need to send an email to a specific alternate address, we can set it directly in addressused.

Unresolved Recipients – There are times when we need to send an email to someone who doesn’t exist in Dataverse at all—for example, an external consultant, new partner, or temporary vendor.

Recenlty we had to send email to particular email address not stored as actual record in CRM, below is how we specified the email address in the Add a new Row (Email) action of Power Automate.

"to": [
  { "partyid@odata.bind": "/contacts(11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555)" },
  { "addressused": "external.partner@example.com" }
],
"cc": [
  { "addressused": "manager@example.com" }
]

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How to – Find Every Cloud Flow That References a Specific Column / Field (Dataverse/ Dynamics 365)

Sometimes we need to find all the flows where a specific Dataverse field is used — maybe before renaming it, removing it, or just checking its usage. Manually opening each flow is slow, but we can do it in seconds with SQL 4 CDS.

For e.g. we want to search for flows that use the field: custom_mysamplefield

For this we can make use of the below query, run it in SQL 4 CDS (XrmToolBox).

SELECT wf.name, wf.workflowid, wf.clientdata
FROM workflow wf
WHERE wf.category = 5
AND LOWER(wf.clientdata) LIKE '%custom_mysamplefield%'

Here table workflow stores flows and workflows details, category = 5 refers to cloud flows, clientdata contains the flow’s JSON Definition.

The result :

Hope it helps..

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Fixing Date Shift Issue After Changing DateOnly Field from Time Zone Independent to User Local – Dataverse / Dynamics 365

In our Dataverse environment, we had a field named custom_sampledate configured as a DateOnly type with User Local behavior. At some point, we changed its behavior to Time Zone Independent, assuming it would prevent confusion across time zones.

A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

At first glance, everything seemed fine. But over time, users in time zones like New Zealand (NZ) started reporting an issue: for older records created before the change, the dates were now showing up as one day earlier than what they had originally entered.

This was because, when we changed the field’s behavior from User Local to Time Zone Independent, Dataverse stopped interpreting the date based on the user’s local time zone. Instead, it began treating the stored value exactly as-is, which caused trouble for values that were originally entered as User Local, especially from users in forward time zones like NZ.

Dataverse stores DateOnly fields as a datetime behind the scenes, with the time part set to 00:00:00.000. The behavior setting (User Local vs. Time Zone Independent) affects how this raw value is interpreted and displayed. Before the behavior was changed, NZ users (UTC+13/UTC+12) were entering dates into a User Local field. Dataverse automatically converted their local midnight time to UTC when storing it.

For example:

A NZ user enters 2025-04-03
Dataverse stores it as 2025-04-02 11:00:00 UTC

Later, when the field behavior was switched to Time Zone Independent, that same stored value was no longer adjusted for the user’s time zone. It got displayed as is as 2025-04-02 which was one day earlier than intended.

However, the new records entered after the change didn’t show the issue, because after the behavior was set to Time Zone Independent, any newly entered values were saved and displayed exactly as the user typed them—without conversion.

To correct this mismatch without losing data, we followed the below approach:

Created a temporary DateOnly field named custom_sampledate_temp, set to Time Zone Independent behavior.
Copied all values from the existing custom_sampledate field into custom_sampledate_temp.
Deleted the original custom_sampledate field (after backups).
Recreated custom_sampledate with the same schema name, but set it back to User Local behavior.
Copied data back from the temp field into the new custom_sampledate field.
Deleted the temp field after verification.

Also check for more information – https://temmyraharjo.wordpress.com/2024/05/18/dataverse-update-time-zone-adjustment-from-time-zone-independent-to-user-local-and-date-time-behavior/

Changing a DateOnly field from User Local to Time Zone Independent, might look harmless—but it can cause subtle issues, especially across global teams. We need to careful before we make this change, as apart from UI this could result changing the JavaScript, Cloud Flows and Plugins where we have used that field to reflect correct date.

Hope it helps..

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Workflow must be in Published state while deleting the Bookings / Work Orders (Dynamics 365 Field Service)Workflow must be in Published state

Recently we were cleaning some of the work orders and related records in one of our environments. However when trying to delete the bookable resource booking record, we were getting the below error. Deleting booking records is required if we want to delete the associated work order record.

A screenshot of a computer error message

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

We verified all the processes – workflows, SLA, and also checked the system’s plugin code, but could not figure out what was causing this error.

Eventually, to delete the booking records, we cleared the associated work orders first for them.

This then allowed us to delete the work orders and associated records

Check for more details on deleting work orders –

Step-by-Step: Deleting Work Orders (Dynamics 365 Field Service)

Hope it helps..

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Fixed – The following solution cannot be imported: Dynamics365SupplyChainExtended. Some dependencies are missing – HCM Common (Dynamics 365)

While trying to install the Dual Write Supply Chain Extended Solution, we got the following error.

We had below apps already installed before installing the Supply Chain Extended Solution.

Dual-Write Application Core Solutions
Dual-write core Solution
Dual-write Dynamics 365 Human Resources
Dual-write Finance and Extended Solutions

Upon going through the documentation, we realized we were missing one dependent package.

We installed the Dynamics 365 HR Common Tables package first, and then on retrying the installation of Supply Chain package we didn’t get any error.

Hope it helps..

Resolve – This environment can’t be copied because your org (tenant) is over capacity. Request an extension (Dataverse / Dynamics 365)

When trying to overwrite another environment with a copy of Prod, the system prevented the operation due to exceeding tenant capacity limits. This copy operation is subject to environment and storage capacity constraints.

We raised a Microsoft Support Ticket and learned that we can resolve this issue by either purchasing additional storage or requesting free temporary storage to complete the copy operation.

We need to raise another support ticket for temporary storage, that includes below details