Category / Dynamics CRM

by Lokin Shah

Unleashing the Power of Dynamics 365 Power Apps as a Platform

In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations are constantly seeking innovative solutions to streamline their processes and enhance productivity. Dynamics 365 Power Apps emerges as a powerful and flexible platform, providing a plethora of features and extensibility options. This article explores the capabilities, market position, cost benefits, and how an expert in Power Apps can assist in designing and developing efficient no-code/low-code solutions.

Power Apps: A Powerful and Flexible Platform

Dynamics 365 Power Apps empowers organizations to build custom applications without the need for extensive coding knowledge. With its user-friendly interface, it allows users to create intuitive and visually appealing applications for a wide range of business scenarios. The platform offers various templates, connectors, and data integration capabilities, enabling seamless integration with other Microsoft services and third-party systems.

Feature-Rich and Extensible

Power Apps offers a rich set of features that cater to diverse business requirements. These features include drag-and-drop visual development, responsive layouts, data integration, AI builder, and pre-built connectors. The platform’s extensibility capabilities allow developers to enhance functionality by adding custom code using JavaScript, TypeScript, and other scripting languages. Additionally, Power Apps integrates well with other Microsoft services such as Power Automate (formerly Flow) and Power BI, further extending its capabilities.

Dynamics 365 Power Apps has gained significant traction in the market due to its versatility and ease of use. Its integration with the broader Dynamics 365 suite, including CRM and ERP solutions, provides organizations with a comprehensive business platform. Power Apps caters to a wide range of industries and sectors, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. The platform’s strong community support and Microsoft’s commitment to continuous improvement ensure its market relevance and future growth.

Cost Benefits over .NET or Java Development

Compared to traditional development using .NET or Java, Power Apps offers substantial cost benefits. The platform reduces development time and cost by enabling citizen developers to create applications without extensive coding knowledge. Organizations can leverage existing Microsoft licenses, such as Office 365 or Dynamics 365, to access Power Apps, eliminating the need for additional investments. Moreover, Power Apps supports rapid prototyping, iteration, and deployment, resulting in faster time-to-market and reduced development cycles.

by Lokin Shah

Dynamics CRM testing as different business roles

One of the best feature of new Unified Interface is impersonation in UI. Here in this blog I will talk about steps to impersonate user to test as another user in browser.

User must have permissions to Act on Behalf of, we tried by giving System Admin permission to user. Then user will be able to impersonate any active user in the system.

Identify different business user roles – e.g. Sales Representative, Sales Manager, Customer Support Agent etc. Identify Record Id for each. Now if you are not developer Identifying “Id” can be challenge. Dynamics 365 Power Pane plugin can be useful for that. Install and enable that in Chrome and when you open User record, you can get Record Id easily. Remove {} when you copy record Id.

Screenshot – Dynamics 365 Power Pane

Install chrome plugin ModHeader.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/modheader/idgpnmonknjnojddfkpgkljpfnnfcklj?hl=en

Now configure ModHeader in Chrome, add MSCRMCalleId request header and value as Record Id which you have identified in previous step. You can add multiple of them, but select only one at a time.

Now refresh the browser to see the user name

Note:

  • In case custom scripts are keeping users Security roles in local cache, you have to clear that and refresh again.
  • You can always open the Audit record and see who updated record “On Behalf of”
  • Make sure to not allow Act on Behalf of to regular business users.
by Lokin Shah

Dynamics CRM Performance checklist

This could be an ongoing topic ever, You have to check health of your CRM on regular basis and/or every time new development is done certain checks should be made. In current Agile world when Business takes very short time to change process software must adapt and frequent changes are desired. There is possible negligence of long term impact causing performance issues.

This could be nightmare for any product owner, technical architect to find the real cause of performance issue. Here list of some standard issues that we investigated and improved upon

  • Improve workflows that may cause delays
    • Longer workflows with too many steps, can be replaced by plugins with few lines.
    • Clean up waiting workflows
  • Automatic deletion of completed items
  • Java Scripts with synchronous calls
    • Loops within Scripts that make sync calls(this is worst programming)
  • Multiple plugins on same event with Synchronous steps(Try to combine them and call from one plugin)
    • This becomes problem, when developers do not want to touch existing code 🙂
  • Late binding server side plugins are faster that early binding.
  • Third party API services, latency and response from other system is key here.
    • Calls made from plugins/custom workflows to external system, this can cause delays in internal processes
    • Calls made by external system to CRM, make sure to create staging entity to collect any data and process them in batches in background.
  • Enable Compression in IIS(On premise)
  • The reason for our issue was OLEDBTImeout !!! Yes because the OLEDBTimeout was 30 sec the deletion jobs were timing out.(OnPremise)

There can be other reasons and possible solutions, feel free to write to me to discuss more ideas you may have.

by Lokin Shah

Uninstalling Managed Solution

Since last few days I have been trying to delete one Managed Solution, its a Salesforce Connector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM (2016). ExactTarget Solution

Here are my notes on approach and resolution

  • Custom stuff – first target
    • Any unsupported customization, scripts, plugin steps registered on having the fields from the target solution.
    • Drop Indexes and statistics that use custom entity attributes
  • Create a new Solution as play area to add/remove items to check dependencies
    • Add All entities to another solution, it will show all other entities where there is relationship to, so go ahead and remove them one by one.
    • You may want to disable all WFs, some times there are specific Bulk deletion jobs also.
  • Add all web resources and for each one check dependencies – Remove/Replace them
    • In our case we had used a custom JS file on default entities.
  • Before you start removing stuff, make sure to check Timeout settings
    • After initial rounds we realized that its timing out while deleting even few thousand records because too many indexes were added
    • Increase timeout to suit your infrastructure (This is only applicable for On-Premise)
  • Delete all data that is for custom entities from the managed solution
    • During uninstall, it failed several time and the reason was timeout to clear data. We had custom Activity as one of the entity with just 70k records but it was taking time.

Data gone, dependencies removed, you are all set to delete solution. If you still find anything keep removing it step by steps.

Some final tips

  1. Avoid deleting it again while earlier process is still in work – Some times if you are not sure.
  2. Do not under-estimate the data deletion – Bulk deletion jobs might take long, so plan the deletion activity in advance
  3. Trace log – Event log is not useful, At times it becomes necessary to enable trace and monitor it when you see repeated failed attempts with no reason for it.

Feel free to share your ideas.

by Lokin Shah

Code review checklist

Below is a small/quick list for Code reviews. (We have mainly used it for Dynamics CRM plugins/custom workflows development, but same can be applied for other .net projects)

Technical – In context of methods being modified/created for current changes

  • Validate for below
    • Database retrieve/query operation that can be avoided, if data is already available or can be collectively retrieved. (Very important because for performance)
    • Multiple/unwanted loops for same collection in a method
    • More checks can be added here…
  • Naming convention
IdentifierCaseExample
Enum valuesPascalFatalError
Read-only Static fieldPascalRedValue
MethodPascalToString
ParameterCameltypeName
PropertyPascalBackColor
  • No warnings must be there (as per the standard rule set being used)
  • No commented code is present
  • Comments
  • Methods must have comments, preferably referencing and matching the algorithms and logic provided in the design
  • Check spelling mistakes in method names/comments
  • Defect number, CR number should not be referenced in code
  • Press Ctrl+K+D (code formatting) to check if code document is formatted properly

Functional

Verify the code as per the requirements (document)

  • For each functionality required there should be code with appropriate comments
  • Check if the logic implemented matches with requirements mentioned
  • Compare new changes with existing, validate if only required code is changed

Happy Coding!!

by Lokin Shah

KB Article – user story

Recently we suggested client to start using KB Article for Cases. There are many articles available for “configuring KB articles” but not much on actually using it, as use cases defers from client to client. Here we would like to share simple yet very effective use of KB Article.

KB article field is already available in case(incident) entity. Below is how we suggested to use this.

Steps:

  1. Setup “Subjects”. Set very specific subjects so that they can be differentiated and cases can be classified easily.
  2. Setup KB Articles as per business use. We recommended to have 1 article per subject which will include details on how to handle the case for selected subject.
  3. Remove existing KB Article section from case, as it takes more space and it resides in bottom. Also reading all the content by scrolling may not be the best approach.
  4. Add KB Article field below subject to make it easily accessible
  5. Now, include custom JavaScript(find attached in bottom) and enable function “RetrieveArticleForSubject” on change of subject field.

So now as soon user selects Subject for the case, available article(published) for the selected subject will get selected in KB article field and users can click to open article in new window. This allows them to continue to work on case and update data and in another window read KB article details.

By using the approach, agents/support team members should be able to get related information quickly.

Code – Find attached file.RetrieveArticleForSubject