Customers will not be able to make use of the Dataverse Connector or Migration Tool. The Access migration tool and connector provided within MS Access streamlines the process of migrating tables, relationships, and data with setup taking just a few minutes, and migration handled for you.

With this feature now in General Availability, customers of Microsoft Access are now just a click away from unlocking the following capabilities for the data currently managed in the Access Database:

• New security and compliance capabilities through Dataverse cloud storage using Azure Active Directory and role-based security while managing it from Access
• The ability to have real-time sharing and editing of Access data using cloud-based data stores, with front-end apps created in Access, Power Apps Mobile and Microsoft Teams 
• New front end app scenarios on mobile devices or with Microsoft Teams

To learn more about this new offering, visit this post on the Microsoft Power Apps blog.

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/access-migration-to-power-apps-and-dataverse-is-released-to-general-availability/

You can also learn about these capabilities in the Microsoft Build sessions available on the blog post link.

To take the next steps and evaluate this for yourself, you can visit https://aka.ms/AccessAndPowerPlatform

The post Migrate your Microsoft Access database to Power Apps and Dataverse appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

First, let’s go ahead and start by enabling these new features. As with previous functionality that I wrote about, enabling the new collaboration features is done via the Power Platform Admin Center. Navigate to your Power Platform Admin Center, select your environment and Go to Settings and Features. Within Features, you will see a section called Collaboration at the bottom of the page (currently). The Enable preview of the modern link sharing UI, co-presence, online status in model-driven apps is going to be set to Off by default. Change this setting to On in order to enable these features.

You can also set the time of the refresh interval for Co-presence, which is set by default to 60 seconds. Don’t set it to a number that is too small or it might have some performance implications. The screenshot below shows you these settings in the Power Platform Admin Center.

Once we have set this option let’s go ahead and navigate back to our Model Driven app. We will open to browser windows with two different users logged in and accessing the same record. What we will see on the screen is that on the right hand side of the command bar, it will display the initials and presence of the other user or users that are logged into the system accessing that same record. This will allow us to quickly connect and collaborate with these other users. The image(s) below show two users logged on to the same record and being able to see that the other is accessing the record.

When you click on the bubble of the one of the users, you will have a couple of options to start collaboration with them. You will be able to Send the other user an email, Start a Teams chat or open their Contact card and start collaboration from there. See these options in the following screenshot.

The next enhancement that is coming out is how the Owner of the record is presented. With this new release plan, the owner will have the presence bubble next to their name. Hovering over their presence will pop up their presence card contact information and list of recent files, and the ability to expand and see their full ownership information. The screenshot below shows some of that information.

Next, we can see that next to the bubble of the other users accessing the record, we have the Share button. This allows us to share and manage the access to this record with other users.

Once we click on the Share button, we will be able to select the users and/or teams that we want to share access to this record with, and provide them with the appropriate Read/Write permissions as required. We can see this in the image below.

There are likely to be additional collaboration changes that will be coming up in the new future to Unified Interface, but for the meantime, I hope you will enjoy the enhancements to this Wave Release.

The post Collaboration enhancements in 2022 Release Plan Wave 1 appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

By default, the legacy Advanced Find functionality will show up after the 2022 Wave 1 is enabled, unless it is configured in the Power Platform Admin Center. To get the modern experience enabled, navigate to the Power Platform Admin Center to the environment that you want this enabled, and click on Settings, and in the Settings page select Product and then select Features. When the Features page will open up, you will see a section called Advanced Find options as shown below

There are two options that can be enabled for the new Advanced Find. The first is the new modern experience, and the second will allow users to hide System views from their list of views that they usually see in their view selector. Now let’s take a look at this modern experience.

When you click on the Advanced Find button in the navigation bar, it will pop up a panel, where you can select the table that you want to search by.

Once you select the table, the page will redirect to the table home page with the default view and the Advanced Filters panel open for filtering. In here you can edit the filter and this will display the results on the page that you are looking for.

The view that you now modified (including the column updates and new filter) will show up with an asterisk (*) next to it. When you open up the view selector, you will notice that at the bottom of the list of views, you have two new options: Save as new view (which was previously available on the Command Bar under the Create View command) and Manage and share views as shown in the image below:

The Save as new view will simply pop up a window asking for the name and description of this new view, and by clicking Save will create this view to be selected as a Personal view.

The Manage and share view will open a panel with options to determine the Sort order of your views (System before Personal, Personal before System or just in alphabetical order). In addition, each view will have the option to be hidden. This will allow end users to hide System views from their list of views in order to have a short list of Most Commonly used views. There is also the option to set the default view from here.

For personal views (which are followed by a user icon), there are additional options which include Sharing, Assigning, Deactivating or Deleting the views.

If you have Dataverse search enabled in the Power Platform Admin center, you will no longer see the Advanced Find button on the navigation bar on top. Instead you will see the dataverse search bar on top. When you click on the dataverse search bar, it will pop up with default search results, and at the bottom of the search bar you will see the option Search for rows in a table using advanced filters. Clicking on this option will open up the Advanced find panel with the options to select a table as previously shown. The image below shows the Dataverse search window with the link for Advanced filters

The one main thing that I can see is still pending is the ability to Export the Fetch Xml, especially for people who are using this for development. I am sure that this functionality will be coming soon, as it is highly requested. If you have multiple environments, you can definitely enable this in your higher environments for your end users, and leave it as old interface in lower environments for development so that you can get the Fetch Xml.

Hope you will enjoy the coming changes.

The post Modern Advanced Find in Unified Interface – 2022 Release Wave 1 appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

We opened multiple support tickets with Microsoft to find the root cause of the issue and improved the performance using the Power Apps Review Solution from the PowerCAT team, but it was still not an acceptable load time.

In the last couple of weeks we have gone through the Api calls when the app was loading, and one of the things that we found out was that the app was making 8 calls on load to the primary table hosting the embedded Canvas App, each time retrieving a JSON of 500 records.

That didn’t make any sense, but we did some further analysis, and the first thing that we found out was the setting of Data row limit, which limits the max number of records to be returned when delegation is not supported, was being called on load multiple times. As we had this setting set up to 2000 it was making 4 calls to return the data on load for each call. We analyzed the data that is to be returned and made some adjustments so that we could accommodate 500 records, and reverted that change.

This change lowered our Api calls on load from 8 to 2.

That was an improvement, but not a full resolution. We are making 2 JSON calls, retrieving 500 records each on the load of the form. This is still taking more time than expected. We were able to get in touch with someone from the product group that provided us some additional insight on this.

The ModelDrivenFormIntegration has two properties, DataSource and On DataRefresh. The DataSource property is set to [@TableName], and the OnDataRefresh is set to Refresh([@TableName]). Each one of these properties is making the Api call that is retrieving the 500 records. Again, doesn’t make sense, but it seems like this is the expected behavior at the time.

Hopefully sometime in the near future, when Converged Pages can be embedded, this will be resolved.

For now, Microsoft did provide a resolution for this, and there are a few steps.

First, get rid of the code in the DataSource property of ModelDriveFormIntegration. That does not have to be loaded. Once you do that, you might end up seeing a bunch of errors, which you will need to resolve.

Next, on the OnDataRefresh property, add the following Code:

Refresh(TableName); // Note that this is not Refresh([@TableName])

Set(PrimaryId, GUID(First([@ModelDrivenFormIntegration].Data).ItemId)); // Not using the [@ModelDrivenFormIntegration].Item for this.

Next, in order to load data from the Primary record, we can add the following logic

If (!IsBlank(PrimaryId),

Set(PrimaryRecord, Lookup(TableName, PrimaryRecordId = PrimaryId));

)

You should then be able to use the Primary Record to populate and link to data in your embedded canvas app. Let’s look at the sample above as if we were using the Account table. The code on the OnDataRefresh would look something like this:

After adding these modifications, we no longer had the 500 records being loaded on the start of the app. There are still some additional performance issues that we are addressing on preload of Power Automate flows, but those are being addressed as well.

I will update this post with additional findings as we continue our process, but for now, it seems that these latest changes will allow us to go live with the solution. I am still finding some issues were this code is not working in other instances of Dataverse in separate tenants, which I am hoping to address soon.

I hope that this might be of some help in your projects, and looking forward to having converged pages embedded in the form.

Click for a Video demonstration

Special thanks to Srinivasa Dutta and Aaron Richards from Microsoft.

The post Embedded Canvas App Performance Enhancements appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

The main issue that is encountered by many organizations relates to the retention policy of audit logs. Until this new changes, there was no retention policy for auditing, and auditing would be kept forever unless manually deleted by the system administrator.

With the new changes, administrators can not select a retention period, so that the audit records will be deleted automatically once that retention period is over. The available options for retentions vary from 30 days to 7 years (30 days, 90 days, 180 days, 1 year, 2 years or seven years). There are also additional options for setting a custom retention period in days or set a forever retention period. The screenshot below shows the default setting prior to making changes to the auditing retention.

The following screenshot shows the available options that are available for selection:

When selecting the Custom retention, the screenshot below shows the option to select a custom retention period and enter the number of days that you want to save your audit logs.

This is a great option when trying to save your log capacity, an issue that I had in the past that required having to go into each environment every 3 months and removing the latest audit log file.

If your tenant is managed by your own Customer Manager Key (CMK/BYOK), this feature does not seem to be available at this time.

The post Audit Retention enhancements in Power Platform Admin Center appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

Although the In-App Notifications are documented as part of the Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 1, and was make available for Public preview in July, it is not yet available as part of GA, so I will be reviewing this new feature here.

So, what is In-app notifications. In-app notifications provide us the ability to alert users on certain processes that have been completed or required their attention, and these are displayed in their Model-driven app as part of the new notifications icon (or notification center).

This notifications feature is not available by default in every environment, and require a System Administrator or App Maker to make this feature available within the app. In order to enable this, we need to call the following statement (which can be done from the console of our browser window while running our model driven app.

fetch(window.origin + "/api/data/v9.1/SaveSettingValue()",{

 method: "POST",

   headers: {'Content-Type': 'application/json'},

   body: JSON.stringify({AppUniqueName: "ENTER_APP_UNIQUE_NAME", SettingName:"AllowNotificationsEarlyAccess", Value: "true"})

   });

An example of the Unique App Name would be: crde4_MyApp. Once this feature is enabled we will be able to use the Notifications table to display notifications to end users.

Now that we configured our environment, let’s go ahead and create a notification. There are a few required parameters (or recommended) that we need to add in order to display the notification, such as the title, owner and body. The owner of the notification is the user that this notification will be displayed for. There are additional options such as Icon Type, Toast Type Expiration and Data which is a JSON string that is used for extensibility and parsing richer data into the notification. The screenshot below shows you the properties

You can read the Microsoft blog on Notification, by clicking on the link below:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/model-driven-apps/clientapi/send-in-app-notifications#notification-table

Most of the sample in the above link are visible via JavaScript. Let’s demonstrate how this would look using Power Automate flow.

In our example we will create a flow that displays a notification when a new account is created. This is a simple flow, without any additional parameters, or configuration of the JSON string.

Let’s go ahead and create the record. As this logic does not require to create a lot of data, I will just enter some minimal data. The only parameters that the flow is actually using is the name of the account and the creator. The image below shows the record that we created.

Once we create the new record, we will receive a notification in the Notification Center or as a toast that the account has been created as shown in the image below.

Now, sometimes the toast notifications are not immediate, and we might have saved the record and closed it, so we would like to have a link back to the record. So let’s go ahead and first modify the flow and see how this works in action. We will add the Data element to create our custom JSON string, so that the user can access the record that was created. The image below shows the changes to the Add New row of the flow to enable a click-through, so that you can open the record that was created.

Once the flow executes, the notification will be displayed to the end user, with a link to navigate to the correct record. Note that sometimes notifications don’t appear immediately and there is a slight delay, but as mentioned previously, this is still in preview.

Additional posts related to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 will be posted by following the link below:

Power Platform 2021 Wave 2 Release Posts

The post Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 Unified Interface Updates – In-App Notifications appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

Some of the main changes that were made to the read-only grid, both within the View page and subgrid were made in order to be in compliance with the Microsoft Accessibility Standard. Due to this some great new features have been added, but also might have caused some features to stop working as expected. We will review these below.

First let’s take a look at the actual grid control. If you are looking at the grid in a Wave 2 Pre-GA instance vs a GA instance, there might be some differences between them.

Read-Only Grid in 2021 Release Wave 1 UCI

Read-Only Grid in 2021 Release Wave 2 Prior to GA

Read-Only Grid in 2021 Release Wave 2 in GA

First there are some performance improvements to the grid as well as the ability for the remember the grid view settings across the session.

Next the new grid control provides the ability to change the width/resize of the columns directly in the view. Simply move your cursor between two columns and you will be able to resize the columns. A sample is shown below:

Next, there is also the ability to reorder the columns in the view. You will notice that next to the Search there is a new icon called column options. Clicking on this icon will display all of the columns in the grid in a pane on the right hand side, and allow us to change the order of the columns using drag and drop functionality.

We also have the ability to add new columns to the view, by clicking on the Add columns button in the column options pane. Clicking the button will display a list of all available columns in the table that we are viewing and simply clicking on the column name will add the column to the list of columns so that we can add a column and change the order. We also have the ability to add columns from related tables in this view as well.

Once you add the columns and apply, you will see the new column in the view, but also you will notice an asterisk next to the view name, specifying that this is not the original view. If you want to save the new changes that you made to the view as a new view, you can do this by clicking on the Create View button, and select the Save as new view option (as show in the image below)

One of the issues that you should be aware of, is that if you added columns and wanted to revert back to the original state, do not use the Reset to default option. That will remove the column from the Column Options, but will not remove it from the grid, and you will not be able to remove it (unless you do a Hard Refresh of the page). If you want to remove a column that you added you will need to go to the column options panel, select the three dots next to the column that you want to remove, and choose Remove from the list of options (as seen below).

Before closing this subject, there are a couple of known issues which Microsoft is addressing at the moment, and might be released a little after the GA of the product.

The first item, is that the ability to filter items by starting letter (See the first image from Wave 1) is no longer available. This has been reported to Microsoft, but a timeframe for this fix is not yet available, but the expectation is that this will be coming soon.

The second item, which might cause some frustration is the selection of multiple records. In Wave 1 (or previously), when wanting to select multiple records, you would need to have your mouse positioned in the cell of the check, and then select the rows that you wanted (shown below)

In Wave 2, there is a radio button in the cell. If you click on the radio button you can select multiple items, however if you click outside of the radio button, it will clear the previous selections, and only select that item that you clicked on. Hopefully this will be addressed soon as well, as it might be a little frustrating.

Additional posts related to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 will be posted by following the link below:

Power Platform 2021 Wave 2 Release Posts

The post Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 Unified Interface Updates – Grid Enhancements appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

Currently when adding values to a lookup control, there are certain capabilities that allow us to find the records that we are looking for. These capabilities include searching for a record by text and changing the view. We also have the ability to create a new record which will open up the quick create form if available.

The image below shows the current layout of the Lookup controls prior to Wave 2.

When you open a similar record in Wave 2, initially it seems like this behavior is the same, but you will notice that the Change View has been replaced by Advanced Lookup. See image below:

So, what is this mysterious Advanced Lookup? The Advanced Lookup will open up a dialog that will display the full view of all the fields that make up the Lookup view for the table that we are triggering. We still have the ability to search in this new popup window, change the view, and every time that the view is changed, we will see the full list of columns in the view (not like we are seeing in the lookup control itself). We are able to select the record that we want, click on Done and get it populated in the Lookup control.

If you click on the link of a particular it will open up that record on a dialog above, so that you can see additional data before selecting the actual record.

Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced polymorphics relationships or multi-table lookups. What this means is that we can have a single lookup control that will provide us the ability of having a data source of multiple tables and not just one (similar to activities, but not multiselect).

There are several ways to create Polymorphic Lookup controls, but probably the easiest way is to do it using the XrmToolBox Polymorphic Lookup Manager plugin. You select the solution and table, add the name of the lookup and then select the entity relationships that are required for this new control.

The image below shows this in XrmToolBox.

Once you have configured your settings, just click on the Create Polymorphic Lookup button, and this will create the new attribute for you. This process can take 15-30 seconds.

If you navigate back to your solution explorer, you will notice that the control is created, but it will not show that the control is a Polymorphic Lookup control, but just a lookup control, and in the related table area it will only show a single related table. Probably something that will be addressed in a later release. The image below shows how this looks in the maker portal.

Now that the control has been created we will go ahead and add it to the form. This is just like any other control that you add to the form. There is no special configuration that is required for this.

In the case below, I created 3 tables to store the manufacturer of a vehicle (Motorcycle Manufacturer, Car Manufacturer and Aircraft Manufacturer). Once I put the control on the form. And click on the search icon on the control, I will see the results from all of the related entities in a single search results, as shown below. You can filter this by record type, by clicking on the link next to Results from, which shows three types of records.

Finally, when we click on the Advanced Lookup link on the polymorphic lookup control, we will get an additional area on the left hand side of the dialog, where we can select which table we want to filter and select the record from. Switching for one option to another will show us different results, but only a single record can be selected. The Add new option on the top right, will now have a drop down next to it, so that if we need to add a new record, we can add the record to the correct table that we want. The image below shows the Advanced Lookup dialog for the Polymorphic Lookup control.

Additional posts related to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 will be posted by following the link below:

Power Platform 2021 Wave 2 Release Posts

The post Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 Unified Interface Updates – Advanced Lookup appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

Editing multiple records at the same time has been a feature used in Microsoft Dynamics/Power Apps for as long as I can remember.

You would basically have to select multiple records click on the Edit button, and this would display a pop up and empty form, where you can make changes to the records and it would update those changes across the multiple records. The screenshot below shows the behavior prior to Wave 2.

One of the biggest issues that I used to have with this feature is that some fields are not always available on all forms, and the form that was displayed for the multi record editing did not always have those fields that I was looking for.

Seems like this has been addressed with the new Edit multiple rows feature that is being released as part of Wave 2. The screenshot below shows the Edit Multiple Rows that is part of Wave 2.

As you can see, a form is being displayed as a pane on the right hand side, and it looks just like a form that I would be opening if I wanted to created or edit the record. We have a display of the number of records that we are editing, the selected form and the tabs that I can navigate through. So how does this resolve the issue that I mentioned above?

The ability to change the forms, allows me to continue the Multi Row editing capabilities on a different form. If I have an Admin form containing all the required fields, I would be able to make the changes in that form, and it would apply to all the required fields.

The screenshot below, comes from the Microsoft Docs page showing the different parts that make up the Multi Row editing screen

The legend for the above image is as follows:

1. Shows the number of rows that you’re editing.
2. Shows the form title.
3. Select the chevron icon to switch from the default form to another form.
4. Select a tab to edit the columns on the form. The header column is always listed on the last tab.
5. If you changed the data for a required column, it needs to contain data otherwise you won’t be able to save your changes.
6. Shows the form details that can be edited.
7. Save or cancel your changes. Saved changes are saved for all selected rows.

Additional posts related to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 will be posted by following the link below:

Power Platform 2021 Wave 2 Release Posts

The post Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 Unified Interface Updates – Edit multiple rows appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

Command bars are at the core of every model-driven app and appear in many different locations. They are arranged in relation to other commands and are associated with a command bar location. The group of commands associated with a specific location make up a command bar.

One of the biggest deficiencies of the Classic Commands, formerly known as the Ribbon, is that there is no low code solution to customize these commands. Command bars can be difficult to customize and error prone (although life has been simplified with the Ribbon Workbench by Scott Durow).

Modern command bars address some of the gaps and difficulties that we had with the legacy commands, and provide support for both Power FX and JavaScript.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at how we can implement modern commanding within our apps. I will use one of the apps that I previously created for this, and add a command bar button that will use Power FX to show/hide the button as well as a custom function that will execute on the click of the button.

In order to start using the new Command functionality, we first need navigate to the page (table in this case) that we want to work with, and select the Edit command bar (preview) option by clicking on the more options to the right of the table name and selecting that option as shown in the image below. This has to be achieved from the Pages navigation pane.

This will pop up a dialog where we have to select what command bar we would like to customize. There are four available options to select which include the Main grid, Main form, Subgrid view and Associated view. The image below shows these options.

Let’s go ahead and select Main form. When the Commands page open, we will see a view that contains all of the existing command bar buttons that are available for the table within the Main form. At this point in time (as this is still in preview, and we don’t know the exact timeline of release), modifying the existing buttons is not currently supported, so any customizations that is needed for this, will have to be done using Ribbon Workbench. The image below shows you the Main form Command Bar before we have added any additional buttons.

Now let’s go ahead and create a new command. We will create a simple command that is called Calculate Credit Limit which when clicked will multiple the number of employees in the company by 10,000, and will set it to only be visible when the number of employees contains data.

To start creating a new command, we click on the new Command button on the top of the left navigation pane.

Once we click on the new command button, we will see that a has been created. We can move the command (using drag and drop) within the Main form to place it in the appropriate location, however this can only be done for new commands, and not the existing ones. Let’s provide the new command some of the properties, such as the Label, Icon to use and the Tooltip text.

Next, we would like to set the functions for the Action that will be performed when the button is clicked as well as the Visibility of the button. On the right Command Pane, the last two options are Action and Visibility. The Action selection has two options: Run formula and Run JavaScript.

If we use the Run JavaScript option we can provide the name of the library and the name of the function to call when the button is clicked. This is more of a legacy type of action which might be used in the future for enabling the legacy buttons. The Run formula allows us to Run Power FX code when the command is clicked.

We can use the Patch function together with the Self.Selected.Item together in order to update the Credit Limit, and then compare the Number of Employees to Blank to control the visibility of the button. I am still working a few glitches as to what is working and what is not when it comes to Power FX for commanding, but the code below is working properly.

On Select:

Set(TotalCredit, Self.Selected.Item.’Number of Employees’ * 10000);

Patch(Accounts, Self.Selected.Item, {‘Credit Limit’: TotalCredit});

Visible:

Self.Selected.Item.’Number of Employees’ <> Blank()

The following Microsoft Docs pages provide an overview of Modern Commanding, directions on the use of the command designer and how to use Power Fx for modern commands.

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/model-driven-apps/command-designer-overview
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/model-driven-apps/use-command-designer
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/model-driven-apps/commanding-use-powerfx

Now, let’s look at the end result after adding the button and publishing the app commands.

Additional posts related to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 will be posted by following the link below:

Power Platform 2021 Wave 2 Release Posts

The post Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 Maker Portal Updates – Modern Commanding appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.