Posts in Category: dynamics 365

The Simplest Dynamics Feature Request

This post is going to have no code and might sound a bit preachy, but I have to get this off my chest because it keeps rearing it’s ugly head.

The new features existing and coming into Dynamics365 are great.  I’ve been spending the last few weeks catching up on some sessions from last year’s Ignite and working with some new features I haven’t had much time for in the past six months.

They are all great and you can see a direction the product is entering.

But here I am, working with a customer to increase their level of adoption with Dynamics inside their company (some rogue groups, it happens, we’ve all been there) and the one thing they ask for…

Can we setup default dashboards for users, groups or teams?

Can we default

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Dynamics365 App Designer – External URLs

I was working with the App Designer this week in Dynamics365 and ran into an issue where I had created a second area in my sitemap but when I went to look in the app itself, I wasn’t able to see it.

If you’re not familiar with where Areas appear in the new Apps view, your second area will show in the bottom left corner (it’s a little hidden but it’s there).

areas.PNG

In my scenario, I had an Area called Tools, but when I went to it I only had one item showing, even though in the designer, I had two and they had all passed validation checks.

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Accessing MetaData with the Dynamics Web Api

In the previous Dynamics365 SDK, accessing metadata required that you go through a completely different service to get at the structure of your data.  With the WebApi, this has changed to simply be another querystring string call to get at your information.

Ignoring how to setup a connection, the query can be as simple as this;

string dataResponse = DynamicsHelper.Instance.GetFromDynamics("/api/data/v9.0/EntityDefinitions?$select=MetadataId,SchemaName");

Where my request for the name and id of all entities in the system is sent via EntityDefinitions.

At this stage in your query, you cannot filter out which entities you want to query for due to the fact that functions such as “contains” are not supported in this interface, thereby forcing you to do this client-side instead of during your trip to the server.

In my scenario I only wanted to return entity

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Understanding Form Types in Dynamics v9

In Dynamics v9, there are four custom form types that you can apply to your entities, all with a variety of features attached to them.  In previous versions there were more types but these have been rolled into these four as part of their usage in Power Apps and the User-Unified Interface.

If you’re new to Dynamics here’s the quick primer on getting started.

Main Form

The main form is strictly what it means, it’s the central form for accessing your entity in the web view across a variety of browsers.  This version of the form has been around for years.

mainform

Quick Create Form

If you want

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Dynamics365 Alternate Keys and UpSert

Using Alternate keys is an easy way to stop doing pre and post checks for whether you can insert data into Dynamics.

Before you had to do a check behind the scenes for whether an “Id” existed and if not go and insert it.

Now using the “Upsert” pattern in Dynamics, you can accomplish this task in one method call using an alternate key.

At’s it’s most simplest implementation, I created a custom entity and a field (wholenumber) that I then declared as my alternate key.

altdesign.PNG

Then I wrote the following code to insert the following record into my system.  You can

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