Configure Azure Service Bus to integrate between CDS and On-Premise SQL database

In this blog post I will demonstrate how to use Azure Service Bus and a Listener application to integrate between the Common Data Service (Dynamics 365 or Power Apps Model Driven Application) and an On Premise SQL Service database.

Format Text by using PCF Control and Regular Expressions

On one of our recent projects, we had a requirement to only allow valid Tax Id Numbers on that field. There are various ways of implementing this, but as the direction seems to be to shift the development of these kind of features to custom controls, we decided to implement it as a PCF custom control.

Error Notification UCI Enhancements in October Release

As part of the October 2019 release (Wave 2), the Unified Interface will receive a few usability enhancements that will address some of the issues that were reported by the community. These enhancements include: Anchoring error notifications, Viewing inline images for emails that are read-only, Improved usability/density and filtering in views and form header usability enhancements.

SharePoint Documents are back in Dynamics Portals October 2018 Release

Ever since Microsoft purchased AdxStudios and replaced the product with Dynamics Portals, one of the biggest pains was the removal of SharePoint documents. The interim solution of course was available using Azure blobs with the Dynamics Labs solution which provided document uploads, but using the Out of the Box SharePoint Documents was a miss by a lot of Portal Developers.

Changing the details page link url for Entity Lists

When displaying entity lists on a web page, there is usually a default column in a view which is displayed as a hyperlink. The link to the page is displayed based on the Web Page for Details View and the ID Query String Parameter Name attributes on the Entity List form (as shown in the image below). The problem is, what happens if my page that is displaying the Entity List already has query string parameters, and you want to keep those parameters on the next page that you are going to display.

Adding masking to form controls in Dynamics Portals

It is a pretty known practice today, that when creating a web application that requests data from customers, certain fields are masked so that the system can prevent the entry of incorrect data. This has been done in desktop applications for a long time and is now also very common in web based applications.

Using Placeholders in Portal Entity Form Text Controls

Recently I was working on a project, where the client needed all fields to have placeholders for accessibility reasons. When looking at the attribute metadata of the Entity Form, we are allowed to enter some text above or below the textbox control (or above the label), but the option is not available to prepopulate the control with some text when there is no data in it. After seeing a few community questions on how to implement this, I thought to share the solution.

Changing Portal Lookup Control to Hyperlink Style Control

Recently we had a requirement to change the Lookup Control in the Portal to look like a hyperlink, so that when the user clicked on the Hyperlink it would pop up the Lookup Dialog.
The Lookup control was displayed as part of an entity form, so the only way to really do this was with jquery.

Multiple Fetch Xml Statements with Or Filter in Portal Web Template

In a recent project, we had a requirement to display cases to the portal that are associated with either Contacts or Accounts. Our case entity had a related entity called Case Contacts, and our account entity had a related entity called Account Contacts. The account entity had a list of all the cases associated with the account.