I want to share a solution that I recently discovered in Power Automate Flow and Logic Apps. It’s a simple yet powerful technique that can help you extract IDs from a JSON object and convert them into an array of numbers. In my case, I needed this array to use as parameters for another Power Automate Flow action. So, if you’re facing a similar challenge, read on to learn how to solve it. In other words, I needed something like…
Did you ever try to remove a managed solution from your TEST or PROD environment? Yes? Then you know how to discover solution dependencies in Dataverse. In other words, you are familiar with the challenge of figuring out which solution contains dependencies on another solution to unlock the uninstall process in productive Dataverse environments. And yes, this can be a cumbersome job to collect all these solution dependencies. On the other hand, you get some help from Dataverse. To do…
Is it possible to create beautiful Canvas Apps in Dataverse for Teams? Yes it is, and the only thing you need to do is to use the “Material Design Component Library for Power Apps” by the one and only M365 Princess Luise Freese and our newest German Microsoft MVP Robin Rosengrün. Both have published last year an amazing open source repository which helps to create a nice looking canvas app in minutes. You get components like an app bar, a…
Where do I change my environment variable values in Dataverse for Teams? Yes, I stumbled upon this simple question last night. I tried to change the values of my environment variables in the usual way. But, I learned again Dateverse for Teams is a little bit different. Long story short: I prepared my session “ALM for Citizen Developers & Admins” for the Global Power Platform Bootcamp 2023. I was importing my solution in Dataverse for Teams within my prepared Power…
Playing around with virtual tables made me aware, that this technology is amazing to integrate foreign data into Dataverse. But what is with Dataverse for Microsoft Teams? Can I also setup virtual tables in these environments? Furthermore, setting up virtual tables in Dataverse for Microsoft Teams seems impossible. This is because, you have no option to access the Advanced Setup like in a real Dataverse: Yes, this is because the Advanced Setup is based on the classic CRM interface. And…
AWS DynamoDB as Virtual Table in Dataverse sounds initially impossible, but it isn’t. The key is to set up an OData service with CRUD functionality. Today I show you how I apply full read and write access from Dataverse to my AWS Data. To shorten a long story, firstly I setup a DynamoDB table as database in AWS. Secondly, I attach this database to my serverless AWS Lambda function, which host my OData API service. Afterwards, I implement create, read,…
Be brave, be curious, explore new worlds! That’s why I took a look outside of Microsoft. I’m sure it won’t surprise you, but there are other competitors like Amazon and Google that provide cloud offerings. This is one reason why data integration is so important for modern digital enterprises. For example, users often need information from other systems in their business process to make decisions. For Dataverse it doesn’t matter, where these data exist. That’s because I can use more…
In my session at Dataverse Summit 2022 I also introduced Business Central’s feature, the virtual tables in Dataverse. Virtual tables complement the possibilities such as Data Sync and Connectors to connect both worlds. In my opinion, virtual tables are the best way of integration. Unlike data synchronization, you do not copy the data from one system to another. Furthermore, virtual tables in Dataverse are similar to physical tables in usage and this is a clear advantage in contrast to connectors….
Did you ever create an API based on Power Automated Flows as endpoints? You might be wondering, why would you do that? Trust me sometimes there is a reason. Furthermore, with the growing Citizen Developer Community and the amount of Power Platform solutions being created, this will become increasingly important in the future. If you have joined my session Power Automate Flows as API at the Azure Developer Community Day 2022 at Microsoft in Munich, you already know the story….
Custom connectors are amazing to consume external APIs in Canvas Apps or Power Automate Flows. But what are you doing, when the external API response does not fit for you? To be honest, this week I had the same issue with an own API. I set up my custom connector and everything was fine. The connector worked as expected and my operation provided a response. So far so good… But, on the second look, I found out my response won’t…