Now, just putting an Excel with some crude data in it won’t really be identified in the Canvas App you are making. Perhaps you’re missing something. Let’s say, I want to read an Excel file from OneDrive For Business into my Canvas App, I select the Excel file from the OneDrive for Business connection like below – But, I’m treated with the below error while making a connection –   Correcting your Excel Well, if your Excel looks like this – Then, that’s the reason Canvas App is not able to connect to the data in the Excel. Here’s what you need to do – click on the top left corner of where your Table should start from and then click on Table from the Insert tab as shown below Confirm that diagonal end of the Table you want to consider and click OK once confirmed Once you confirm, you’re Excel data will look like this which is correctly formatted into a Table –   Reading the Table Now that you’re set, you should be able to read the Excel file’s Table which you can connect to. Hope this quick tip helps!!  

One of the most common errors we come across while calling API to create records in Dynamics but isn’t clear what it means? One such issue is – “An error occurred while validating input parameters: Microsoft.OData.ODataException: Does not support untyped value in non-open type.” On the console of the browser, you’ll see this – But, if you open the <objectName>.responseText of the Failure message of the call, you’ll see the below – A more zoomed view of the error would be below – This is because of my typo in the code [Which is the case for most scenarios] where you mistype a name of the field and neither does the error itself doesn’t specify which field you’re missing out on nor what it means! Reason This is because of a simple typo  in one of the fields in the object I was creating using AJAX In my case, this should have been “entity.duration” and not “entity.durationn“. It was a simple issue which led me wander troubleshooting in areas which I shouldn’t look into. Hope this saves you some valuable time! Happy 365ing!

Isn’t it just too easy to see from Flow (Power Automate’s) Runs what data was passed on? A simple switch in the Power Automate designer will secure this. Default Behavior By default, if you have access to the Flow, you can simply go in and see the inputs Secure Input / Output In the Flow designer, you can select and step and go to Settings And turn on Secure Input / Output depending on what you want. It says this is still in Preview as of the day of writing this post. Once this is Active, it is denoted by a Lock symbol on the step you enabled it on. And now, when you try to look at the data, it will hide away the information Note: Please note that this will run only for the Run History records after this was turned on. The previous records will continue to show the data.   Hope this helps!!

In a hurry, you perhaps selected a similar looking Price List on your Quote and you want to change it. Example: By mistake, I have selected “SalesPriceListINR” and want to select “SalesPriceListUS” But when you try to do this, you can’t see the PriceList you want to set. Why is that? Currency That’s because the Currency selected on the record is Rupee (₹) and your PriceList has the currency US Dollar ($) Change it to US Dollar and you’ll see your PriceLists show up. And try searching your Price Lists again Error while changing PriceList In a typical scenario, if you have child records dependent on the record you are changing, you’ll see this error. But as simple as the wordings are, you’ll need to do the needful and make sure there are no Currency dependent records associated. Hope this helps!    

Using Xrm.WebApi needs you to be careful with the field names and what to use when. Especially, when you are dealing with Lookups. One of the most common errors you’ll come across is the one like below – “An undeclared property (fieldname you entered) which only has property annotations in the payload but no property value was found in the payload.” This is confusing as to what needs to be put in while setting the lookup. If you have done the below, entered the name of the field which is all in small caps  – object[“msdyn_resourcerequirement@odata.bind”] = “/msdyn_resourcerequirements(<Guid>)”; This will result in the above error!!!   You’ll need to put the Schema name of the lookup field instead and this should solve your problem – and the code should look like this – object[“msdyn_ResourceRequirement@odata.bind”] = “/msdyn_resourcerequirements(<Guid>)”; And this should totally work for you!! Hope this helps! 🙂

In Dynamics plugin implementations, you might have lengthy complex plugins that makes calls to Dynamics several times. I agree that calls to Dynamics should be as less as possible and use Link Entity as much as possible and the plugin should be well designed to handle such lengthy executions. However, there are instances where these plugins are probably updating some fields that in-turn trigger some other sync processes and the execution begins to take longer than it should. At times, such lengthy executions result in the plugin timing out. In the case of Dynamics 365 Online, the timeout is 2 minutes and you can’t change it. (In on-premise, you can) And now, you need to know what’s taking so long! So I want to propose a method which proved effective for me to identify this. First, in case you are looking to work with Tracing for plugins, here’s a great blog on the same – Debugging Your Plug-ins with the Plug-in Trace Log Add DateTime to Trace Logs One of the best approaches to identify what portion of the plugin execution is actually taking time to process is to keep adding Trace logs and that too, with a timestamp! This will give you an idea of what part of your plugin is taking long to execute and will give you a fair idea if anything needs to be redesigned. Set these traces at the very beginning of your plugin and at all necessary places as well as the very end to cover execution cycle well. And your logs will actually record the time when that operation was hit. So now, you have an idea of how the 2 mins are spent and maybe start troubleshooting in that direction. I hope this quick tip helps!

Most of us need this in our workflow conditions to check against – to have today’s date handy and then use them in If conditions in workflows. But, the filter in If conditions in workflows don’t let you dynamically select On or after ‘Today’. And when you want to compare to today’s date on selection of On or After, you are forced to enter a date and not dynamically select Today. To overcome this, here’s what you can do to simply store Today’s Date in all records. Calculated Date and Time field So workaround this, you can simply create a new Date and Time type of Calculated field to store the current date and use it in your workflow conditions or wherever you need it. Make sure the type of the field is Calculated and then, Edit the criteria. Select Now() function to set the value of the field. And the final criteria condition will simply look like the below Once you save and publish all your changes, you’ll see that the field is automatically populated with today’s date. Using in Workflow Conditions Now, you can use the same in the workflow conditions as shown below – and you should be able to use this in your workflow conditions which could look like this Hope this quick workaround comes handy!    

Mircosoft D365 Project Service Automation is a product that unites technology, processes, and people together in streams such as sales, billing, resourcing and delivery in a company. Thus, a business can scale up high when they use this particular software. They can complete the project on time and within the budget as a result of using this product from Microsoft.  Businesses can accelerate the maturity of their professional services when they use this software. Managing the project becomes easy for the management team and the project managers. Learning and using software is also pretty easy. It does not take a lot of time to master this product.  Here are some details of how this software will help your company: While booking resources, you often don’t pay attention to how much capacity the resource has. Or rather, you are aware, but you want to book the resource anyway (only to change later on, which I don’t recommend.) In that case, if you are trying to overbook a resource out of their capacity, you are treated with this message below – Why this occurs? This is because of the Work Hours defined for the Resource. Rather, what Work Hour Template is assigned to that resource. Now, let’s say, you are trying to book someone for 8 hours on top of their already booked 2 hours If you switch to the Hours view, you’ll see the availability marked by white cells. Grey meaning, unavailable. Remember, this is even said in the error message when you tried to click Book. Alternative Of course you can do this, but you should have a very strong reason to overbook resources. 🙂 Switch to Evenly Distribute Hours to allow the resource to be booked on top of the existing one. And this should be fine, but it will appear in red indicating that the resource is overbooked. Say, 10 hours (on top of already booked 2 hours) – exceeding the 9 hours total limit. Suggested You should rather Propose Book the resource, this way, the booking will exist and won’t bloat the schedule board. And then, you can decide later to do something with it. Front Load – Proposed Now with combination of Front-Load and Proposed, you should be able to Book for only the remaining capacity Evenly Distributed – Proposed With Evenly Distributed Proposed, you should be able to exceed the capacity and even Propose for the full time you want.   Hope this quick tip helps! 🙂  

These fields which are everywhere but you don’t really pay attention to really mean something worth. So if you feel you want to get hold of someone for modifying a record. Maybe also take a look at Modified By (Delegate) just in case so that the actual user might be someone else who wanted to do another thing on that record. 🙂 Impersonation is one of the basic aspects of a plugin step that you need to carefully design to let another user (usually Admins for most implementations) make the plugin run under their context instead of giving more security roles/privileges to every other new user. Well, the same goes for Created By & Created By (Delegate) also! Modified By Usually, when you update something on a record, the Modified By is updated as expected. But notice that Modified By (Delegate) is not updated. That’s because you are the rightful owner of the record and there’s no other person involved. But what is someone else is modifying the record (who don’t have access to that record)? In that case, the Modified On (Delegate) field is populated with the name of that user. In such scenarios, Modified By (Delegate) the user is the one who caused changes to the record. Why Modified By (Delegate) was populated The reason this was populated was that the record was updated through a plugin by a user who doesn’t have write access to the record. But because the user invoked a plugin which was Impersonating as a User who has rights to the records, the record was successfully updated. And this, the actual user who called the plugin is the one who will be populated in the Modified By (Delegate) field. Hope this quick tip helps!

Wave 2019 Updates brought some really sought-after features. Another one which I would like to bring up is the Lead Qualification experience. I’ve written this post when I enabled the Early Opt-in of Wave 2 Oct 2019 Updates. To enable Early Opt-in, please refer this post – Early Opt-in for October 2019 Wave 2 Updates This is set to release for the Oct 2019 Updates. Default Behavior So when you Qualify Lead by default – Account, Contact and Opportunity records are created. Notice that by default, the created Account and Contact are always auto-filled. Lead Qualify Experience in System Settings By default, D365 will let you create all three – Account, Contact and Opportunity records when you Qualify a Lead. When you select No, you’ll be asked which all entities should be created when you Qualify a Lead.   Lead Qualification for selected entities No, when you click on Qualify button, you’ll be treated with this Dialog box where you can choose what records should be created. I’ll select only Opportunity this time   And only Opportunity will be created and notice that the Contact and Account are blank this time. Hope this is useful! Thanks. Related Blog on one of Wave 2 2019 Update: Customize Opportunity Close dialog box in D365 CE v9 Unified Interface – Wave 2 update I’m also listed on the Top 100 CRM Blogs and Websites on Feedspot. It has a curated list of awesome bloggers.