Rajeev Pentyala – Microsoft Power Platform

Recently, I got a deployment (ALM) specific query from my SharePoint colleague who was exploring Power Platform’s Canvas Apps.

Query:

• SharePoint team got 3 Sites (i.e., Dev/QA/Prod) and they also use 3 different Power Platform environments for Development, QA, and Production.
• On Development environment, a Canvas App was built connecting to ‘Dev’ SharePoint site.
• When the ‘Canvas App’ moved to QA and Production environments using Solution import, it must connect to the ‘QA’ and ‘Prod’ SharePoint sites.
• Following diagram depicts the topology.

Solution:

• It’s pretty a common scenario and one option would be post solution import to QA/Prod environments, reestablish the Connection reference manually. This option is time consuming and not intuitive.
• Other recommended option is “Data source environment variables”. We will see the ‘How’ part in next section.

Data source environment variables:

• As we know, Environment variables store the parameter keys and values, which then serve as input to various other application objects.
• Environment variables are now much simpler to work with and can store parameters required to connect to data.

In this article, lets see how to create and consume Data source environment variables in Canvas App.

Configure Data source environment variables:

Create Environment variables:

In this article, I am using SharePoint site to connect from Canvas App.

• Create a SharePoint site if not exists already and add a list using native ‘Issue Tracker’ template (You can also use any List of your choice).

• From Power Apps maker portal, connect to Dev environment and create a new solution.
• Create a new ‘Canvas App’ from the Solution.
• Now, from Canvas App, go to ‘File-> Settings’, enable the setting to Automatically create environment variables when adding data sources.

• Add a SharePoint data source and configure the Site and List.

• Once you add the ‘SharePoint’ data source, you would notice a banner message, indicates Environment Variables were auto created.

• Click on the ‘Manage them here’ will redirect you to the Solution where you can access the auto created ‘Environment Variables’.

• That’s all needed to create Environment Variables.

Configure Environment variables during Solution Export and Import:

Exporting Solution:

• Before exporting the solution, select one of the Environment variables and choose ‘Edit’ and select ‘Remove from this solution’.
  • This is step is important. You will not be prompted for new values during solution import if the environment variables already have either a default value or value present, if not chosen the ‘Remove from this solution‘.

• Repeat this step for other Environment variables.
• Export the solution.

Importing Solution:

• Select the target environment (I.e., QA in my case) and choose import the Solution.
• You will get following ‘Connections’ pane which will allow you to configure to the QA SharePoint site.

• You will be redirected Connections screen to establish connection to QA SharePoint site. Once you establish connection, it looks as below.

• Go back to Solution import process and map the new connection configured in above step.
• In the next step of import, system will ask you to provide values for the Environment variables (i.e., Site, List).

• You would not get above Connection reference and Environment Variables panes, if you have not chosen the ‘Remove from this solution‘ option.

This approach eliminates manual step of reestablishing connection post solution import to Target environment.

Important Points:

• ‘Data Source Environment’ variables doesn’t require querying environment variables via Dataverse connector or require premium licenses.
• The Environment variables can be unpacked and stored in source control using DevOps Power Platform tools.
• We can also use ‘Pre-existing’ data source Environment variables by creating a new ‘Environment Variables’ of ‘Data Type’ of ‘Data source’.
  • Use this option, if you don’t want auto creation of Environment Variables (i.e., By enabling the setting to Automatically create environment variables when adding data sources).

Refer docs for more details.

🙂

Using in-app notification feature (Preview) we can notify Users with in the Model-driven apps. In this article lets learn how to enable the feature and use the in-app notifications with different options step by step.

Enable In-app notifications feature:

• Connect to Power Apps Maker Portal.
• Open the ‘Model Driven App’ using ‘Edit in preview’ option.

• In the App Editor, select ‘Settings -> Upcoming’ and enable the In-app notifications (Preview) as below.

Create a Test User:

• To test the In-app notifications, create a new user account. This User acts as recipient of notification.
  • Note: If you already have more users in your environment, skip this step and use one of the existing Users as recipient.
• I’ve created an User named ‘Test User 1’ to send the notifications to.

• Open the Model driven app in another browser using the Test User account.

• Next copy the ‘Test User 1’ GUID by opening the User from ‘Advanced Find’. We will use this GUID while creating notification.

As we completed pre-requisites, its time to create notifications.

Creating our first notification:

• Notification features uses an OOB table called “appnotification”.
• We create a record in ‘appnotification’ table which turns out to be a notification for targeted User.
• Each notification row is meant for a single user, identified by the Owner column value.
• If a notification needs to be sent to multiple users, a record needs to be added for each recipient.
• The sender controls the recipient through the Owner column.

Following is code snippet is using ‘Client API’ to create a basic notification.

function showBasicNotification() {
    // GUID of User (i.e.,Test User 1 in my case) whom you want to send the Notification to.
    var systemuserid = "0758fd55-c2ca-ec11-a7b5-00224808dd66";
    var notificationRecord =
    {
        "title": "Welcome",
        "body": "Welcome to the world of app notifications!",
        "ownerid@odata.bind": "/systemusers(" + systemuserid + ")",
        "icontype": 100000000, // info
        "toasttype": 200000000 // timed
    }
    // Create notification record
    Xrm.WebApi.createRecord("appnotification", notificationRecord).
        then(
            function success(result) {
                console.log("notification created with ID: " + result.id);
            },
            function (error) {
                console.log(error.message);                
            }
        );
}

• Register the showBasicNotification() function on one of the form jscript events (i.e., On Load/On Save/Field_OnChange).
• For this blog post, I’ve registered script on ‘On Load’ event.

• Use Browser ‘DevTools’ (F12) to check the successful execution of function.

• Up on executing the script, end user (i.e., Test User 1) would get a notification as below.

Notification with Action(s):

• Using “data” tag we can create notifications that include actions, custom body definitions, and custom icons.
• Following code snippet contain 2 actions (i.e., 2 URLs to navigate to) in Notification.
  • ‘actions’ is an array.

function showNotificationWithMultipleActions() {
    // Notification with multiple actions as center dialog 
    var systemuserid = "0758fd55-c2ca-ec11-a7b5-00224808dd66";
    var notificationRecord =
    {
        "title": "Different Search Options",
        "body": "This is to inform you that you can use following search options",
        "ownerid@odata.bind": "/systemusers(" + systemuserid + ")",
        "icontype": 100000000, // info
        "data": JSON.stringify({
            "actions": [
                {
                    "title": "Bing",
                    "data": {
                        "url": "https://bing.com",
                        "navigationTarget": "dialog"
                    }
                },
                {
                    "title": "Google",
                    "data": {
                        "url": "https://google.com",
                        "navigationTarget": "dialog"
                    }
                }
            ]
        })
    }
    Xrm.WebApi.createRecord("appnotification", notificationRecord).
        then(
            function success(result) {
                console.log("notification created with multiple actions: " + result.id);
            },
            function (error) {
                console.log(error.message);
            }
        );
}

• Up on execution, End User gets a notification with 2 navigation actions as below.

Notification with a custom Title and Body:

• The data field supports overriding the Title and Body simple strings with a limited subset of markdown based.

• Below is the supported markdown.

Text Style	Markdown
Bold	**Bold**
Italic	_Italic_
Bullet list	- Item 1\r- Item 2\r- Item 3
Numbered list	1. Green\r2. Orange\r3. Blue
Hyperlinks	[Title](url)

• Newlines can be included with the body using \n\n\n\n.
• Following is a code sample using ‘Markdown’ to customize Title and Body.
  • Under ‘actions’ tag, url is pointing to an existing record.

function notificationWithCustomTitleAndBody() {
    var systemuserid = "0758fd55-c2ca-ec11-a7b5-00224808dd66";
    var notificationRecord =
    {
        "title": "Example of Custom Title and Body",
        "body": "Maria Campbell mentioned you in a post.",
        "ownerid@odata.bind": "/systemusers(" + systemuserid + ")",
        "icontype": 100000004, // mention (Displays @ symbol)
        "data": JSON.stringify({
            "title": "[Potential Prospect](?pagetype=entityrecord&etn=raj_prospect&id=48f5d750-cbca-ec11-a7b5-00224808dd66)",
            "body": "Here is a [Potential Prospect](?pagetype=entityrecord&etn=raj_prospect&id=48f5d750-cbca-ec11-a7b5-00224808dd66)",
            "actions": [
                {
                    "title": "View record",
                    "data": {
                        "url": "?pagetype=entityrecord&etn=raj_prospect&id=48f5d750-cbca-ec11-a7b5-00224808dd66"
                    }
                }
            ]
        })
    }
    Xrm.WebApi.createRecord("appnotification", notificationRecord).
        then(
            function success(result) {
                console.log("notification created with custom title and body: " + result.id);
            },
            function (error) {
                console.log(error.message);
            }
        );
}

• Up on execution End User receives notification as below.

Notification with a custom Icon:

• Within the notification, set iconType to Custom and in the body, include iconUrl with a value pointing to a web resource.
  • “icontype”: 100000005, // custom
  • “data”: “{ ‘iconUrl’: ‘/WebResources/cr245_AlertOn’}”
• The icon can be either an SVG or PNG file type.

• Following is the ‘notificationRecord’ object.

var notificationRecord = 
{
  "title": "Welcome",
  "body": "Welcome to the world of app notifications!",
  "ownerid@odata.bind": "/systemusers(" + systemuserid + ")",
  "icontype": 100000005, // custom
  "data": "{ 'iconUrl': '/WebResources/cr245_AlertOn'}"
}

• Notification with Custom icon looks as below.

Key points on Notification usage:

• If you don’t specify “ownerid@odata.bind” in ‘notificationRecord’ object, notification will go to the User who created Notification.
• Notification Polling:
  • In-app notifications uses polling to retrieve notifications periodically when the app is running.
  • New notification are retreived at start of the model-driven app and when a page navigation occurs as long as the last retreival is more than one minute ago.
  • If a user stays on a page for a long duration, new notifications will be retrieved.

• Notifications appear in the notification center until the recipient dismisses them or they expire. By default, a notification expires after 14 days but your administrator can override this setting
• You can change in-app notification behavior by setting Toast Type to one of the following values.

Toast Type	Behavior	Value
Timed	The notification appears for a brief duration (the default is four seconds) and then disappears.	200000000
Hidden	The notification appears only in the notification center and not as a toast notification.	200000001

• You can change the in-app notification icon by setting Icon Type to one of the following values.

Icon Type	Value	Image
Info	100000000
Success	100000001
Failure	100000002
Warning	100000003
Mention	100000004
Custom	100000005

🙂

With this preview feature,

• Users are no longer restricted to accessing/managing data in their own business unit.
• Users can now access and own records across business units.
• Security roles from different business units can be assigned to the users regardless of the business unit the users belong to.
• This feature enables the Owning Business Unit column of the record so that it can be set/updated by the users.
• The Owning Business Unit column determines the business unit that owns the record.
• Business units’ data access can now support “Matrix data access” structure.

Modernize Business Unit – Feature Goals:

Modernize Business Unit – Design Elements:

New Organization Settings while Changing the User’s Business Units:

Refer following videos to learn more about this preview feature:

• Video 1
• Video 2

🙂

Text in Dataverse is a data type that can store a max of 4000 characters. Text has multiple formats that instruct the UI to treat it differently.

As an example, Email is a text format tells the client to treat the contents of the field as an email. It can display the data as a link that, when clicked, launches your default email client and inserts the address in the To: field.

There are 2 new formats, json and richtext have been introduced.

Json 

• json format will store text strings in a json format.
• This format will not perform any validations on the correctness of the json. It simply allows you to store, view, and retrieve the content with json markup.
• This is currently limited for use on non-SQL tables (like Data Lake).

Richtext 

• richtext format will allow the use of markup tags to format your text when viewed in a compatible control.
• By setting this value you can enable richtext for any other text or multiline text column.
• A control is coming soon in the Canvas and Model Driven space that will be used whenever a column indicates it is richtext.

Please refer this article for more details.

🙂