CRM and PowerApps revisited

Last year in June, I had written a blog about PowerApps. I created a simple app that could update a few fields and the entity image of Contact records, but there were a few problems with the functionality. Microsoft Flow, CDS and PowerApps are getting a lot of attention these days, so I decided to revisit my original blog and create the same app with latest PowerApps functionality. Since the PowerApps studio has changed from the original version, I have a made a few changes to the app as well. I am using PowerApps app installed on my Windows 10 machine.

Here are the steps:

Creating an app using Dynamics 365 as data source

Create connection and generate a default app

1. In PowerApps, Select New  >> “Start with your data” >> Dynamics 365 , as shown in the screenshot below.
   
   
   
2. Create a new connection to your CRM Online organisation. In my case, I already have connections, as shown in the screenshot. Click on the dataset for your organisation (in my case it is HPE).
   
   
3. Select Contacts from the dropdown and click Connect, as shown in the screenshot.
   
   
4. PowerApps will create an app. The app will have 3 Screens:
   • BrowseScreen1 (Home Page with a list of the contacts and a search box)
   • DetailScreen1 (Displays the details of the selected item on BrowseScreen1)
   • EditScreen1 (Opens the selected record/new record in edit mode)

Update search and sort conditions on the browse screen

1. On BrowseScreen1, select the browse gallery. the editor will display the Items properties.
   
   
2. Change the value of the “Items” property to SortByColumns(Search(Contacts, TextSearchBox1.Text, "fullname"), "lastname", If(SortDescending1, Descending, Ascending)). It will change the search criteria to “fullname” and sort the records by “lastname”.

Select fields to display in the gallery

1. Select the fields in the first item of the gallery and choose the CRM field you would like to display in that control, as shown in the screenshot below.
   
   
2. Choose the other fields to display in the gallery. The image control on the gallery is already set to display the entityimage of the contact.
   
   

Select the fields on Detail and Edit screen

1. Select DetailScreen1 and then select Data sources from the View Menu. It will display the Data window as shown in the screenshot below.
   
   
2. Select DetailForm1. It will display all the available fields in the Data pane as shown in the screenshot. Click on the purple eye in the options pane to add or remove the fields on the form.
   
   

Change the theme of the app

1. You can change the color schema for the app by selecting predefined themes under Home>>Themes.
   
   

Save and Share the app

1. Save the app by providing the name of the app. You have an option to save the app on the cloud or on the local machine.
   
   
2. Share your app with your colleagues by selecting Share this app.
   
   

Testing the App

I am testing this app on iPhone 7S. To run PowerApps on your mobile device, install PowerApps from the app store.

1. Logon to the PowerApps and choose your app.
   
   
2. The app will display the browse screen.
   
   
3. Select the record to view the detail screen. All the fields are disabled on this screen.
   
   
4. Click on the edit icon to edit the record.
   
   
5. Click on Change Picture to upload a picture. On iPhone, you will get the following options.
   
   
6. Take a new picture/select an existing picture and press save.
   
   
7. Have a look at the browse screen. It should display a picture on the edited record.
   
   

Conclusion

In general, I think PowerApps is great to build something quick instead of spending months to go live, but performance must be improved to make it usable in the real world.

Improvements

There are a few improvements in the latest version of PowerApps.

1. Image control can display CRM entity images. This was not working a year ago.
2. Image control can access iPhone camera. In my last attempt, I had to add the camera control to take the picture.
3. The performance is better than a year ago.

Issues

1. Photos take a long time to load. On the browser screen, the data fields load very quickly but photos appear after a few minutes.

2. Users can’t control the orientation of the photos selected in the image control. Some photos get loaded with the wrong orientation. I have read on the PowerApps community forum that the PowerApps team is working on it.

3. CRM connector does not have an option to retrieve specific columns instead of all the columns.

CRM Web API and Certificates Issues

I have not written a blog in last 8 months as I have been travelling nonstop for work. In this blog, I am going to share some behavior I came across a few weeks ago.

So here is the story. We are using CRM Web API for integration between the on-premise system and CRM online. We are calling the CRM Web API from JavaScript running on the on-premise server using OAuth authentication. We used a process very similar to what is described in the following article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt595797.aspx.

Generally, we don’t need to manually install SSL certificates of public sites on our personal machines, as most browsers and operating systems have already installed the root CA certificate of well known certificate authorities like Symantec, Digicert, Microsoft, etc.

For security reasons, in an enterprise environment most of the root CA certificates/trusted public authorities are removed from the integration servers.

To make the successful calls to CRM Web APIs, you have to install the following certificates onto your integration severs.

1. Certificate to communicate with https://login.microsoft.com
2. Dynamics CRM 365 Certificate

Now the real story. We installed the certificates, and everything was working as expected for a couple of months, when suddenly it stopped working. After some investigation, we found out that we are not getting the authentication token from https://login.microsoft.com. A bit more investigation, and we found out that the issue is related to the certificate. The server certificate presented by https://login.microsoft.com was different than the certificate we installed on our integration server. The old certificate was not expired, but still replaced by a new one. We replaced the certificates and everything is back to normal. I have attached the screen shots of both the certificates.

Old Certificate

New Certificate

If you look at the certificates, the original certificate was issued by Symantec and was expiring on March 18th 2018, while the new certificate is issued by Microsoft itself. I hope this won’t happen again. So if your calls to CRM Web APIs stop working, check your certificates.

Dynamics 365 and Logic Apps–Part 2

In the first part of the blog, I had created a Logic App that serves as a callable endpoint to create a record in CRM. In this blog, we will look at adding some exception handling to the same app. Please read the first part Using Logic Apps to create records in Dynamics 365 - Part 1 to understand this part.

Current Solution

The process for the current solution in depicted in the following diagram



If the Create a new record is successful the Response action will return the customer else the Logic app will through an error message.

What will happen when CRM throws an error

For this blog, I have created a synchronous workflow that will throw an error message if the Last Name is not provided in the request.

Error 1 (ResponseTimeOut)

I am sending the following request without the last name.

 {  
  "customer": {  
   "firstName": "MSCRMShop",  
   "lastName":,  
   "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street",  
   "city": "New York"  
  }  
 }  

The Logic App returned the following error message.

 {  
  "error": {  
   "code": "ResponseTimeout",  
   "message": "The server did not received a timely response from the upstream server. Request tracking id '08587170410911854011608943569'."  
  }  
 }  

Reason

The reason behind the timeout error is that there is timeout limit of 90 seconds for a single http request in Logic Apps. The other question is that why CRM would take so long to return the error message. The reason is that CRM is not taking that long to throw the error message. It is the default retry policy of the Logic Apps that will try 5 times before throwing the error message.

For verification, open the Logic App in Azure portal and look at the failed run. The action will display the message shown in the following screen shot.



The App run is showing that the execution duration is 1.92 minutes. The error captured in Create a new record is the actual error thrown by CRM
Now log on to CRM and check the execution history of the workflow. It will display that it has been executed 5 times.

Solution

The solution in this scenario is to set Retry Policy to None for the action Create a new record. Switch to code view of the app and add the retry policy section as shown in the following screen shot.

Error 2 (NoResponse)

After fixing the Error 1, call the Logic App again by passing same body as in Error 1. This time the app will return the following error.

 {  
  "error": {  
   "code": "NoResponse",  
   "message": "The server did not received a response from an upstream server. Request tracking id '08587169819578381630235279815'."  
  }  
 }  

Reason

The reason is that there is no response defined in our current solution to handle the error. The only response defined in the Logic App is to return the customer Id on successful creation of the record in CRM. Every action in Logic Apps have a section named “runAfter” which defined when this action will be executed.

Solution

The solution in this scenario is to add another Response action that will be executed after the failed execution of Create a new record action.

1. Add a new Response action to the app and set the properties as shown in the screen shot below.
   
   
   
   Status Code is set to output of Create a new Record, Headers section contains the content-type and Body is set to body of Output of Create a new Record.
2. At this stage Response 2 will be fired on successful execution of Response action.
3. Switch to the code view of the app. Scroll down to Response 2 definition.
4. Change the runAfter section as shown below.
   
   
5. Save the app.
6. Switch back to designer mode and if there is no error in the app. It will look like the following screen.
   
   
7. Test the Logic App again without passing the last name in the request body. This time Logic app will return the following message.
   
   

This solution will only capture the errors thrown by CRM (Create_a_new_record action). If the error occurs before the call that won’t be captured by the solution.

More Resources

Check the following resources for advanced error handling information.https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-logic/app-service-logic-exception-handling
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-logic/app-service-logic-scenario-error-and-exception-handling

Using Logic Apps to create records in Dynamics 365 - Part 1

According to Microsoft documentation, Logic Apps is a service to simplify and implement scalable integration and workflows in the cloud. As a CRM professional I was aware of Microsoft Flow but not of Logic Apps. Microsoft Flow is actually built on Logic App Most of the features and API connections are the same.

The major difference is that Microsoft Flow is targeted for business users whereas Logic Apps is targeted towards IT professionals and developers. Logic Apps can have some additional connections like BizTalk APIs. The other major difference is that Microsoft Flow workflows are created in production but Logic Apps provides the DevOps and security assurance.

The following link details the comparisons between Microsoft Flow and Logic Apps
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-compare-logic-apps-ms-flow-webjobs#flow-vs-logic-apps
For this Blog I am building a Logic App that will act as endpoints to create records in Dynamics 365. The good thing is that we don’t need to write code to create the endpoints.

Create a Logic App

1. Logon to the Microsoft Azure Portal.
2. Create a new Logic App by Navigating to New>>Web +Mobile>>Logic App as shown in the screen shot below.
   
   
   
3. Enter the app name and other information as required and click Create. (I generally checked “Pin to Dashboard” to open the app straight from the dashboard)
   
   
   
4. Open the newly created app.
   
   
   
5. Click on Edit to open the designer.
   
   
   
6. Select Request from the list of the managed APIs as shown in the screen shot.
   
   
   
7. Enter the JSON schema for the request. I have created a customer object with first name, last name, street address and city.
   
   
   
8. Click Save. It will populate the URL field of the request. This URL will be used as endpoints to call the Logic App.
9. Click New step and choose Add an action.
   
   
   
10. Select Dynamics 365 – Create a new record from the managed APIs list.
    
    
    
11. Choose the Organisation Name, choose the Contacts as the entity name and map the first name, last name, street address and city with the JSON schema added in step 7.
    
    
12. Click New step and choose Add an action as shown in the screen shot below.
    
    
    
13. Select Response from the list.
14. Enter the following information as shown in the screen shot below
    • Status Code of 200 (Which represents successful call).
    • Enter the “content-type” in the Headers section.
    • Enter the JSON in the body section. I am returning the contactid of the newly created contact.
15. Save the app and test it.

Testing the Logic App

For testing we need to call Logic App using URL created for Request step 8 of Create a Logic App.

For this blog, I am not creating a new application to call the endpoints(Logic App). I am using PostMan to create and send the request. Here are the steps.

1. Open the PostMan application.
   
   
   
2. Enter the URL copied from the Request.
3. Enter the Headers as shown in the screen shot below. The endpoints are expecting JSON.
   
   
4. Enter the Body and Click Send. The  Logic App will return the customer id as shown in the screen shot below.
   
   
5. Open the CRM and check the contact is created.
6. If there is an error, go to Azure portal and look the app summary and troubleshoot the error.
   
   

That is it . You got your Logic App as callable endpoints.

 

Adding Icons and Tooltips to grid columns in Dynamics 365

I was going through the “What’s New” section of the Dynamics 365 SDK and found out that you can now add icons and tool tips to the grid view columns.
Microsoft has added the 2 imageproviderwebresource and imageproviderfunctionname to the layout xml of the <cell> attribute of the saved query. These fields can be used to attach a web resource and JavaScript function that will display the icon and the tooltip.
For this blog, I am displaying red, yellow and green light bulbs based on the priority of the case.
Here are the steps:

Create 3 Icon web resources

• Find 3 icon/image files for red, green and yellow color. I am using PNG files of size 16x16 pixel for this example.
• Create a new web resource of type “PNG Format” as shown in the screen shot below.
  
  
• Repeat the above step for green and yellow icons.

Create a JavaScript web resource

Create a JavaScript web resource with the following function. It is the same function that is used in SDK sample. The function takes the 2 parameters rawdata and userLCID. The userLCID can be used to display the tip in different languages. Check the SDK example for details. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328457.aspx#BKMK_CustomIcons. In this example I am not using userLCID as only default English language is installed in my CRM.

 //display icon and tooltio for the grid column  
 function displayIconTooltip(rowData, userLCID) {  
   var str = JSON.parse(rowData);  
   var coldata = str.prioritycode_Value;  
   var imgName = "";  
   var tooltip = "";  
   switch (coldata) {  
     case 1:  
       imgName = "new_/images/red.png";  
       tooltip = "High Priority Case";  
       break;  
     case 2:  
       imgName = "new_/images/yellow.png";  
       tooltip = "Noraml Priority Case";  
       break;  
     case 3:  
       imgName = "new_/images/green.png";  
       tooltip = "Low Priority Case";  
       break;  
     default:  
       imgName = "";  
       tooltip = "";  
       break;  
   }  
   var resultarray = [imgName, tooltip];  
   return resultarray;  
 }  

Attaching JavaScript web resource to the view column

• Open the view for which you would like to display the icons and tooltips. For this example, I am using “My Active Cases”.
• Select the column Priority and click on “Change Properties”
  
  
• Specify the JavaScript web resource and function name.
  
  

Results

Publish all the customizations completed in the above step. Navigate to “My Active cases” and check the results. You will notice different color icons based on the priority of the case.

Enhancements to Client side Notifications in Dynamics 365

Microsoft introduced client side notifications in CRM2013. Dynamics 365 has introduced enhancements to this functionality.
A new method addNotification has been added to to the client side API. This method can:

1. Display a error or recommendation notification. In the earlier version the only option available was error notifications.
2. It also allows you to specify and execute actions based on the notification. The new method not only display the notification, it also display 2 buttons:

• “Apply” to execute the action
• “Dismiss” to close the notification

Code

The following sample code will display recommendation notification if there are numbers in the “name” of the account. If the user clicks on “Apply” button, it will remove the numbers from the name and clear the notification. If the user clicks on “Dismiss” button, the notification will be closed.

 function addNotification() {  
   //get the name control  
   var myControl = Xrm.Page.getControl('name');  
   //get the name attribute  
   var accountName = Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.get('name');  
   //get the value name attribute  
   var accountNameValue = accountName.getValue();  
   //if the account name is null then return  
   if (accountName.getValue() == null) {  
     return;  
   }  
   //regular expression to find numbers  
   var r = /\d+/;  
   var s = accountNameValue.match(r);  
   //if match the display the message  
   if (s != null) {  
     var actionCollection = {  
       message: 'Remove the numbers from the name?',  
       actions: null  
     };  
     actionCollection.actions = [function () {  
       //remove the numbers  
       accountName.setValue(accountNameValue.replace(/[0-9]/g, ''));  
       myControl.clearNotification('my_unique_id');  
     }];  
     myControl.addNotification({  
       messages: ['Number/s in the account name'],  
       notificationLevel: 'RECOMMENDATION',  
       uniqueId: 'my_unique_id',  
       actions: [actionCollection]  
     });  
   }  
 }  

Results

When the user clicks “Apply”, the system removes the number 7 from the name.


This functionality will be very useful in number of scenarios, for e.g. validating a field and recommending a value, moving the focus to specific tab or field, validating the field value on the parent entity, and opening the parent form to update the fields etc..