Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

In this article lets understand the basics of preparing and executing the fetchxml liquid template tag.

Lets first start with the basics of Liquid Tags and Template Tags.

What is a Liquid Tag:

• Liquid Tags make up the programming logic that tells templates what to do.
• Tags are wrapped in {% %}.

What is fetchxml Template tag:

• A Template tag is a category of Liquid Tags.
• fetchxml template tag, Allows user to query data from Dataverse, and render the results in a page.
• Following is the syntax:

{% fetchxml resultVariable %}
<!— Fetchxml query -->
...
{% endfetchxml %}

• ‘resultVariable ‘ in above sample, holds FetchXML query results and a few other attributes.

Now that you got the basics of fetchxml template tag, let’s proceed with its configuration and execution using an example.

Prepare and Execute the fetchxml template tag:

• I have a following Offer table in my Dataverse with 3 records. Let’s fetch these records and display them on the website’s Home page using the fetchxml template tag.

• First, generate the Offer table’s Fetch xml. To generate I used Advanced Find option. You can also use the Fetch XML Builder tool from XRM Toolbox.

• Generated Fetch XML looks as below:

• Now go to the Portals Designer and open the Home page in VSCode using Edit code option.
• Place the following fetchxml liquid tag:

{% fetchxml resultOffers %}
        <fetch version="1.0" output-format="xml-platform" mapping="logical" distinct="false">
          <entity name="raj_offer">
            <attribute name="raj_offerid" />
            <attribute name="raj_name" />
            <attribute name="statecode" />
            <attribute name="raj_providername" />
            <order attribute="raj_name" descending="false" />
            <filter type="and">
              <condition attribute="statecode" operator="eq" value="0" />
            </filter>
          </entity>
        </fetch>
      {% endfetchxml %}      
      <table>
        <th>Name</th> 
        <th>Provider</th> 
        {% for offer in resultOffers.results.entities %} 
        <tr> 
          <td>{{ offer.raj_name }}</td> 
          <td>{{ offer.raj_providername }}</td> 
        </tr> 
        {% endfor %}
     </table>

• Save, sync, and refresh the website. You should see the Offer records on Home page.

Understanding the fetchxml template tag code:

In the following fetchxml template tag,

• resultOffers : Variable holds the results of exeucted Fetch XML.
• resultOffers.results.entities : Offer records collection.
• <table>: Used to display offer records in a row and column format.

{% fetchxml resultOffers %}
        <fetch version="1.0" output-format="xml-platform" mapping="logical" distinct="false">
          <entity name="raj_offer">
            <attribute name="raj_offerid" />
            <attribute name="raj_name" />
            <attribute name="statecode" />
            <attribute name="raj_providername" />
            <order attribute="raj_name" descending="false" />
            <filter type="and">
              <condition attribute="statecode" operator="eq" value="0" />
            </filter>
          </entity>
        </fetch>
      {% endfetchxml %}
      
      <table>
        <th>Name</th> 
        <th>Provider</th> 
        {% for offer in resultOffers.results.entities %} 
        <tr> 
          <td>{{ offer.raj_name }}</td> 
          <td>{{ offer.raj_providername }}</td> 
        </tr> 
        {% endfor %}

Hope you now understand the basics of how to prepare and execute the FetchXML template tag.

🙂