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).
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.
Accessing USD Customization Files
A little known issue that you might see crop up from time to time is when you go to download your zip file from the customizations section of the USD you are immediately presented with an error that the “Record is Unavailable” even though it clearly is.
This can be incredibly painful because sometimes all you need to do is update a configuration and redeploy.
Getting to your file is possible, but requires a few extra steps.
Using Advanced Find, search against the Annotations/Notes that you are looking for (in my case USDQueueControl.zip.
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Azure Configuration Settings
If you’re still doing configuration in web.config files for your Azure services, it’s time to try something new and leverage something that has been there for quite some time – Application Settings.
In your Azure Portal, you will notice a section called Application Settings. Within this section is everything you need to configure your application. If you have some custom configuration data in your web.config file, a simple way to rely less on the web.config (and make your end administrator’s job a little more easier) is to expose these configuration values via Application Settings.
The process to create a new Application Setting is straight-forward, create the setting, add the value. (In this case I created a key called Tool).
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
Manually Setting up the Unified Service Desk
I had a problem a few weeks ago where I could not get the sample applications to install via the Package Deployer for the Unified Service Desk. After way too many hours trying to get it to work, I decided to manually install the thing so I could get it up and running.
WARNING: The following steps have been performed on v9.0 of Dynamics365 and serve to get your Unified Service Desk up and running with only the base configuration.
Installation
Download the Unified Service Desk Package Deployer, available here.
When extracted navigate tot eh solutions folder as shown below.