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Dynamics Portals – Add Download feature to the Forms
In my previous article I’ve explained the Portal styling using Metadata option.
This article is the extension to the styling article, where I will explain how to add ‘Download’ feature to the Form.
I am going to use the ‘Registration’ form as an example, and will see the steps to add a ‘Download’ link to a word document.
Add the Document as a Web File:
- As a first step, create a new ‘Web File’ and note down the ‘Partial URL’.
- Next, add the document which you want your Portal user to download from Portal, as a Web File attachment under notes.
Design HTML with Download link:
- Design the HTML page as per your requirement.
- For the download link, add a <a> tag with an ID.
- Add a JScript function, to read the <a> tag by ID and set the web file URL in the document.ready() event.
- Add the HTML to the Portal entity forms ‘Metadata’ record.
- Browse the Portal form and you should see the document link, which opens the document on click.
Note:
- You can only add the allowable file types as the ‘Web File’ attachment.
- To change the allowable file types, navigate to ‘Settings -> Administration -> System Settings’ and modify in the ‘Set blocked file…‘ field.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Using ‘Emojis’ in Entity Form and Entity List
In this article, lets see how to use Emoji’s to capture the data in Portal’s Forms.
It’s very simple to achieve. All you need to do is to set the Dynamics ‘Option Set’ field’s ‘Label’ with ‘Emoji’.
Below is the ‘HOW’ part.
Create an ‘Option Set’ field with ‘Emojis’:
- In Dynamics, create a new ‘Option Set’ Field with 2 options
- In the Option’s ‘Label’ paste the Emoji.
- Place this ‘Option Set’ field on the Dynamics Form and View which are being referred in your portal’s ‘Entity Form’ and ‘Entity List’.
Make ‘Options’ to render side by side in Portal:
- By default, ‘Option Set’ renders as ‘Drop down’ control in Portal.
- To show the ‘Options’ as Side by Side, add a new ‘Metadata’ to ‘Entity Form’.
Test the Emojis in Portal:
- Navigate to Portal and open the ‘Employees’ view. Option Set value would renders as ‘Emoji’
- Open the record and you should get ‘Emojis’ rendered side by side.
Note:
- You can ‘Copy’ the Emoji from here . Search the Emoji as per your requirement and click ‘Copy’.
- The rendering of Emojis will be same in ‘Dynamics Web Application’.
🙂
ADX\Dynamics Portals – Using sub grids in Entity Form
In this article, lets see how to work with ‘Sub grids’ on ‘Entity Forms’ in Portals.
Lets take a scenario to understand this better, In Dynamics:
- Create a new custom Entity named ‘Employee’
- Create a related entity ‘Child’ to capture children details of ‘Employee’
- Configure a single portal screen, to capture ‘Employee’ and ‘Children’
Below is how the ‘Employee’ entity form with ‘Children’ sub grid, in Dynamics, looks like:
High level design steps:
- Create a new ‘Entity Form’ for ‘Employee’ Dynamics form
- Create a new ‘Entity Form’ (i.e.,Child Create) for ‘Child’ entity to ‘Insert’ (i.e., Mode=Insert) record
- Create a new ‘Entity Form’ (i.e., Child Details) for ‘Child’ entity to ‘Edit’ (i.e., Mode=Edit) record
- On ‘Employee’ entity form, configure ‘Child’ ‘Sub grid’ using ‘Entity Form Metadata’
- Add ‘Create’ and ‘Details’ actions on Sub grid.
Now lets see step by step.
Create new ‘Entity Form’ Employee:
- Create a new ‘Employee Details’ Entity Form pointing to ‘Employee’ entity and ‘Information’ form.
- Now lets see how the ‘Employee’ form looks in the portal.
- If you notice, there is a grid section ‘Children’ available on Portal form, however its unusable, as there are no ‘Create’ or ‘Edit/Details’ options.
Configure ”Entity Form Metadata’:
With ‘Entity Form Metadata’, we can make sub grid usable. We can add actions (i.e.,Create/Edit/Details buttons) and to the sub grid.
- Go to ‘Employee’ form site map and click on ‘Entity Form Metadata’
- Under the ‘Type’ select ‘Subgrid’ and choose your ‘Subgrid Name’
- Next, we need to configure ‘Create’ and ‘Edit’ buttons to the sub grid.
- Under the ‘Grid Configuration’ tab, click on ‘Create’ and fill the ‘Entity Form’ (i.e.,Child Create) details
- To add, Edit/Details action click on ‘Details’ and fill the ‘Entity Form’ details
- Note: Even though, I choose ‘Details’ action, my associated ‘Entity Form’ (i.e.,Child Details) is set form mode ‘Edit’ which can be used to view and edit.
- Save the ‘Entity Form Metadata’.
Test the functionality:
- Login to your portal
- Clear the Portal Cache by navigating to “Portal URL+‘/_services/about’”
- Note: This step is optional and needed only if you don’t find your changes in portal
- Open the ‘Employee’ record and now you should see ‘Child’ grid with ‘Add new child’ button.
- Click ‘Add new child’ button and it will open up ‘Child Create’ entity form.
- Click ‘Submit’ which saves the record.
- Now either click on 1st column or ‘Details’ button to ‘Edit’ the record which opens up ‘Child Details’ Entity form.
- Modify the data, if needed and click ‘Submit’
🙂
ADX/Dynamics Portals – Date field custom validation using JScript
Other day, In one of our Portal Web Form step, we got a requirement to validate ‘Date Of Birth’ where the value should not be the future date.
We can achieve this by adding a custom validator using JScript and register in your ‘Web Form Step’.
Below is the JScript code snippet which you need to paste in your Web Form Step’s ‘Custom JavaScript’ control.
Note:
- In below script replace the ‘new_dateofbirth’ with your field’s schema name.
- ‘new_dateofbirth_label‘ is the label of the DOB field on your Web Form Step.
$(document).ready(function () {
try{
if (typeof (Page_Validators) == ‘undefined’) return;
// Create new DOB validator
var dobValidator = document.createElement(‘span’);
dobValidator.style.display = “none”;
dobValidator.id = “dobValidator”;
dobValidator.controltovalidate = “new_dateofbirth”;
dobValidator.errormessage = “<a href=’#new_dateofbirth_label’>Date of birth should be in past.</a>”;
dobValidator.validationGroup = “”;
dobValidator.initialvalue = “”;
dobValidator.evaluationfunction = function () {
var dobValue = $(“#new_dateofbirth”).val();
var dob=new Date(dobValue);
var today = new Date();
if (dob > today) {
return false;
}
return true;
};
// Add the dobValidator to Web Page’s validators array
Page_Validators.push(dobValidator);
// Attach event handler of the validation summary link
$(“a[href=’#new_dateofbirth_label’]”).on(“click”, function () { scrollToAndFocus(‘new_dateofbirth_label’,’new_dateofbirth’);});
}
catch(e)
{
alert(“Error during DOB validation – “+e.description);
}
});
- Save the Web Form Step and test in portal.
- If you try to save DOB with future date. It shows warning in the banner as below:
- Click on the message and it will take you to the DOB control.
Refer my other article to get familiar with Portal syntax’s.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Entity List – Integration using OData feed
With Dynamics Portal’s Entity list ‘OData Feed’ option, we can expose the data in the form OData API, which can be further consumed by external applications.
Lets take a scenario,
- You have a public facing Dynamics Portal where people gets registered, which get stored as ‘Contacts’ in Dynamics CE instance.
- You need to share all the ‘Active Contacts’ to your back end team which uses an Excel sheet to manage data.
It can be achieved by enabling OData feed on Entity List by following below steps:
- Open your Entity List and go tot ‘OData Feed’ section. (Refer my previous articles on how to create an Entity List)
- Enable the ‘OData Feed’ option along with below details
- Entity Type Name : Your Dynamics entity schema name
- Entity Set Name : Can be anything but as a best practice provide plural name of your Dynamics entity.
- View : Select the view. The structure of your OData feed would be determined based on the view you pick.
- Once the ‘OData Feed’ enabled, you can get all the oData feeds enabled on Portals by forming URL -> {Your Portal URL}+”/_odata“
- Now access the ‘Contacts’ oData feed by forming URL -> {Your Portal URL}+”/_odata“+Entity Set Name (i.e., contacts)
How to consume the oData API in Excel:
- Copy the OData set URL
- In the new Excel sheet, go to Data -> Get Data -> From Other Sources -> From OData Feed
- Paste the OData URL and click ‘OK’
- Click ‘Load’ to load the data to excel sheet.
- If you want to Transform data like replace ‘Null’, click on ‘Transform Data’
- Your excel sheet shall looks as below once the data loads.
Note:
- The OData API URL is accessible anonymously with no authentication prompted.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Entity List Filters
Dynamics Portals Entity List is a easy and seamless way to port Dynamics 365 CE entity views to Dynamics Portals.
As an example, if I port ‘Active Contacts’ and ‘Inactive Contacts’ views to Portals, Portal User would start see all the Contacts based on his Web Roles.
Now lets implement a filter condition, to show only those Contacts where the logged in ‘Portal User’ (i.e., Contact) Company belongs to.
With out Filter Condition:
- I logged in to Portal as ‘Rajeev Pentyala’ whose Company is ‘Northwind Traders’ and having ‘Adminstrator’ Web Role.
- I can see all the Contacts irrespective of ‘Company’
With Filter Condition:
- With Filter Condition in place, I will see only those Contacts from my Company ‘Northwind Traders’
- To configure ‘Filter Condition’
- Open ‘Entity List’ form
- Under ‘Filter Conditions’ section, select ‘Account Attribute’ as ‘Company Name(parentcustomerid)’
- Open ‘Entity List’ form
Metadata Filter:
- What if we have to provide option to the ‘Portal User’ to filter the records based on field values?
- In below screen, Portal User has an option to filter records based on 2 Company Names (i.e., Northwind Traders, Adventure Works)
- This behavior can be achieved using ‘Metadata Filter’ option.
- In this article, I am going with ‘FetchXML Filter’ option, to provide filter options based on ‘Company Names’.
- Open ‘Advanced Find’ and prepare the filter.
- Download Fetchxml and copy only the <filter> tag
- Note: Add ‘adx:uiname’ property in <filter> tag to customize the filter label in Portal.
- Paste it in ‘FetchXML’ field and Save
- Notes:
- You can define more than one ‘Metadata Filters’.
- Refer article for detailed usage of Filters.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Portal Checker
‘Portal Checker’ has been added as part of Portal capabilities version 9.1.1 for Dynamics 365 CE apps.
Portal checker for Dynamics 365 for CE Portal is a self-service diagnostic tool that can be used by Portal administrators to identify common issues in their portal.
- Connect to Dynamics 365 Administration Center
- In the Portal administration screen, click on ‘Diagnose and resolve problems’
Portal checker helps to identify issues with your portal by looking at various configuration parameters and provides suggestions on how to fix them.
Refer this article for more details
🙂
Dynamics Portal – Configurations packaging and migrating to different instances
In Dynamics CE, to move Customizations and Configurations from one instance to another, we rely on Solutions.
How about migrating Dynamics Portal configurations from one instance to other?
- As we know, Dynamics Portal development involves several configurations and Customizations to achieve a desired experience for portal end users.
- To migrate Portal configurations from the source Dynamics CE instance, and then importing it into the target Dynamics CE instance, you would need to use the Configuration Migration tool and a portal-specific configuration schema file.
- Schema files are available for the following portal types:
Refer this article for detailed explanation.
🙂
[Step by Step] Dynamics Portals – SharePoint Integration
In this article I am going to walk you through the step by step process to integrate Dynamics Portal with SharePoint.
Why we need to integrate Portal with SharePoint?
- To answer the question, lets take a scenario, A company has an Employee Health portal where employees upload their Medical Bills and diagnostic reports to reimburse the money incurred due to hospitalization. On the other side Companies admin team access the documents either from D365 application or SharePoint portal to validate and release the money.
- If the documents get uploaded to SharePoint through the Portal, with the robust SharePoint document management features, the documents can be edited, versioned and accessed anywhere online just from a browser.
Now lets see the steps to integrate portals with SharePoint.
Pre-requisites:
- Dynamics 365 subscription (Get 30 days trail)
- SharePoint Site
- Dynamics Portal
Configure SharePoint Site:
- Once you have your Dynamics 365 subscription, login to your Office 365
- Click on ‘SharePoint’ link to connect to SharePoint Portal
- Next step is to create a new ‘Site’
- Click on ‘Create Site’ and fill the details to complete Site creation.
- Copy the URL which you would need in next steps.
- I created a new site with name ‘D365’
Configure SharePoint Site in D365 Application:
After creation of SharePoint Site in previous section, now we need to add this details in D365
- Open your Dynamics Application
- Go to Settings -> Document Management Settings
- In the ‘Document Management Settings’ window, paste the SharePoint Site URL copied in previous section in ‘SharePoint Site:‘ text box.
- In the ‘Select entities’ grid, select the entities you would like to add Documents from your portal.
- I selected ‘Case’ entity as I am using in this article
- Click ‘Next’ and ‘Select folder structure’
- Click ‘Next’ to complete the set up.
- Connect to Dynamics 365 Administration Center
- Select your Portal from ‘Applications’ and click on ‘Manage’
- Click on ‘Set up SharePoint integration’ -> Enable SharePoint integration
- Provide credentials and complete the set up
Configure ‘Case’ entity portal form and Entity Permissions:
To be able to upload documents from Portal, we need to add a sub-grid on Case form.
- Connect to Dynamics 365 Application
- Open Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System
- Select ‘Case’ Entity and make sure ‘Document Management’ is checked.
- Open ‘Case -> Forms -> Web-Edit Case‘ form
- Note: As I am going to upload documents from existing Case in Portal, I chosen ‘Web-Edit Case’ form. Chose your from as per the requirement.
- Add a new sub-grid with below details.
- Entity – Document Locations
- Save and Publish.
Lets grant ‘Entity Permissions’ to ‘Sharepointdocumentlocation’ entity whoever having access to ‘Case’ entity.
- Navigate ‘Portals -> Entity Permissions’
- As I am planning to upload documents from ‘Case’ entity, I am selecting ‘Customer Service – Cases where contact is customer‘ entity permission.
- Add a new ‘Child Entity Permission’ on ‘Sharepointdocumentlocation’ entity and grant below privileges.
- Save and Close.
How to upload the documents from Portal:
Once you made all the configurations, we are all set to upload the documents.
- Connect to your portal
- Create a new Case or open an existing Case
- Navigate to the ‘Document Location’ sub-grid and click ‘Add Files’
- Upload the document
- You should see the uploaded document in the sub-grid.
🙂
Dynamics Portal Issue – Unable to submit Entity Form
Recently we encountered a strange issue in our Dynamics Portal SaaS variant.
We got a requirement to allow Portal users to create ‘Custom Activity’ records from Portal.
To achieve this, we created an Entity form for the Custom Activity with mode set to ‘Insert’ and configured Web Template.
Issue:
- After configuring Entity Form, Page Template and Web Template, we could not save the record from Portal.
- Up on ‘Submit’ button click on Create form, there was no server post back.
- On browser console, “Unable to set property ‘isvalid’ of undefined or null reference” exception has been logged.
Reason and Fix:
- Issue was due to the additional character in ‘Web Template’ Source HTML content (refer below highlighted) and correcting the HTML fixed the issue.
🙂
Rajeev Pentyala - Microsoft Power Platform 