I was trying to imagine how would “AI” adoption go, and, it seems, there is only one possible outcome in the long term. “AI” is there to either compliment human workers or to replace them, but, ultimately, it’s there to increase productivity in those areas where it can be adopted. In a very limited number of cases, there is almost no limit to how far that increase can go (scientific research, perhaps). But, for instance, say there is a car dealership. Ultimately, there are only so many cars that dealership may be able to sell or service, so, once the productivity of the sales managers / servic ..read more

It seems I’ve been experiencing strange consequences of giving up on my MVP renewal, which is that I now don’t need to worry about sticking to some (real or imaginary) rules, I don’t even need to write anything here, but, somehow, that together just unlocks some of the topics I probably did not dare to write about before. Specifically, what’s the actual difference between supported and unsupported customizations? This mostly applies to the DOM model manipulations, since there are not a lot of other things we can do there which would not be supported (as in, if you can’t do something with a plu ..read more

It’s been there forever – you raise an error from the plugin, and you get Business Process Error popup in the UI. That’s all good except that not everyone likes that kind of popup title: So how about making it a different title? There is no supported way of doing this, but, well, lately I’ve been starting to think that, perhaps, “supported” or “not” is more a question of comparing pros and cons. If you can do something to make things look better without introducing huge risks, then it may be worth doing it. And, in order to change the title, you just need to add a MutationObserver – there is ..read more

There are two different onLoad events in the client-side XRM framework, and I did not know that… Well, it’s better to find it out late than never https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/developer/model-driven-apps/clientapi/reference/executioncontext/geteventsource Here is how it works: OnDataLoad happens on on initial page load, when formContext.data.refresh is called, or when the data is saved and there is a change OnLoad, on the other hand, is called on initial page load, and, also, when a new record is first saved Actually, I used to think OnLoad does what OnDataLoad do. Maybe it ..read more

Turns out we can’t use process.setStatus freely to finish a business process at any time – it has to be in the final stage. Otherwise, we can only abort a process. Come to think of it, it is neither too obvious, nor too counter-intuitive. Either way, the code below works, it seems: formContext.data.process.setStatus(“finished”, result => { if(result == “invalid”) formContext.data.process.setStatus(“aborted ..read more

Changing primary owner of your flows in the maker portal is simple – just go there, choose a flow, click “Edit” in the details section, then change the primary owner. This usually makes sense when setting up an application account as a flow owner, since that protects us from unexpected failures if the user-owner leaves the organization, for example. The only caveat is that it either has to be done for each flow separately in the maker portal, or, for those of us who can use Azure Devops pipelines for deployment (which is, surprisingly, not “all of us”), it will be done automatically. However ..read more

I think I have finally made piece with the decision not to apply for my MVP renewal, but it’s still worth a bit of an explanation. It won’t be long, though. First of all, when Andrey Butenko asked if I’d be interested in being considered for an MVP award back in 2017, I thought “wow, sure I would”. After all, it’s sort of a highly coveted award in this field, so, yes, it was an honor, it was a recognition, and it was something I definitely wanted to have back then. Well, in that sense Andrey is the godfather of my MVP award , and I probably can’t thank him enough for the experience. However, f ..read more

This post is part of a series of posts. Please use the links below to navigate through the related posts: Macro Templates Introduction Deployment Dataverse Tables Custom Page Dialog Power Automate Flow Javascripts Template File Final Notes Git Sources To deploy the solution, follow these steps (loosely): Choose a sharepoint site you are going to use Add MacrosTemplates folder and Data folder under it (all in the “Documents” library) Upload DataExportTemplate.xlsx into MacrosTemplates folder Now deploy the solution When deploying, configure SharepointSiteUrl variable to point to the Share ..read more

This post is part of a series of posts. Please use the links below to navigate through the related posts: Macro Templates Introduction Deployment Dataverse Tables Custom Page Dialog Power Automate Flow Javascripts Template File Final Notes Git Sources In the Macro Templates demo solution, there are only 3 tables: Technically, only two of those are needed for the templates (“Document Teamplate” and “Template Download”), the only reason there is yet another one (“Template Demo Data”) is to have a table in the application where templates functionality is enabled. Instead of that third one, I c ..read more

This post is part of a series of posts. Please use the links below to navigate through the related posts: Macro Templates Introduction Deployment Dataverse Tables Custom Page Dialog Power Automate Flow Javascripts Template File Final Notes Git Sources I’ve already mentioned the javascript when explaining how custom page dialog works, so you might want to re-read that part quickly, there are just a few more things to mention. Here is how file download works: There is a “fetch” call to get the file from a url (in this case we are talking about the template selected through the custom page dia ..read more