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

In this beginner’s guide to Power Pages, let’s learn how to automatically populate a Contact lookup field with the currently logged-in Portal User.

In my website, there’s a Subscription webpage featuring a basic form named Subscription. This form includes a ‘Contact’ lookup field, and I need it to automatically populate with the currently logged-in portal user.

To achieve this, I will be creating a Basic Form Data.

What is ‘Basic form metadata’:

• The Basic Form Metadata contains extra behavior modification logic to augment or override the functionality of form fields that is otherwise not possible with native basic form editing capabilities.
• For instance, if you want to assign a different label name to a field in the Portal than what is defined in Dataverse, you can create a Basic Form Metadata.

Setting up lookup with logged-in portal user:

• Copy the Contact lookup Logical name which we will need it in the next steps.

• Open the Portal Management app.
• Select the form (i.e., Subscription) you will to enhance from Basic Forms under the Content section.
• On the basic form that has fields that you would like to modify, go to Related > Basic Form Metadata
• Select New Basic Form Metadata.

• Select Type as Attribute and from the dropdown select the Contact lookup which we copied in the first step.

• Next, select Type as Current Portal User and Form Attribute as Contact (contactid)

• Save the Basic Form Metadata record.
• Go back to the Power Pages Studio and Sync the changes.

• Preview the website, and you’ll see the Contact lookup field automatically populated with the logged-in portal user.

🙂