ENGINEERED CODE BLOG

Power Pages: When to Use (and When Not To)

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Engineered Code

The growth of Power Pages has been an amazing story. Since being acquired by Microsoft in 2015, the product has gone from a niche add-on for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement to a full-fledged product in the Power Platform. The visibility that comes with getting equal billing to other Power Platform products like Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate means that new people are discovering Power Pages all of the time. However, as with any software product, Power Pages isn’t always a fit, even if your project fall under the category of low code web application development platforms. In this post, I will share what I look for when trying to determine if Power Pages is a fit for a given project.

Power Apps Portals: Using Bootstrap Input Groups with Your Basic or Advanced Forms

Posted on May 13, 2021 by Engineered Code

The fact that Power Apps Portals uses Bootstrap as its CSS framework means we have a lot of tools as our disposal (yes, I know we’d all love it if we could use a newer version of Bootstrap, or even pick whatever framework we wanted, but that is a topic for another day). Unfortunately, some of the Bootstrap components require specific markup that we can’t achieve with configuration alone. In this post I’ll cover how we can use JavaScript to change the markup on either Basic Forms or Advanced Forms so that we can leverage the Input Group functionality (in case you missed the memo, Basic Forms is the new name for Entity Forms, and Advanced Forms is the new name for Web Forms).

Power Apps Portals: Hide the Existing Account Checkbox on the Redeem Invitation Page

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Nicholas Hayduk

One of the subjects I seem to be dealing a lot with recently is invitation codes – so much so that this was the featured topic for this month’s Portals Community Call. During that call I promised to share a small bit of CSS that would hide the “I have an existing account” checkbox on the Redeem Invitation page, so I’ll do that in this post, as well as give a bit of background as to what the checkbox is used for, and why it most cases you probably don’t need it.

Power Apps Portals: Adding Custom Styles to Legacy Front-Side Editor

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Nicholas Hayduk

While Microsoft continues to invest heavily in the Portals Studio, which provides a new What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editing experience for Power Apps Portals, there are still many good reasons to use the Legacy Front-side Editor. In this post I’ll describe how you can add additional styling options to the rich text editors to allow content authors to create consistent pages.

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Power Apps Portals: Web Forms with Complex Conditions

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Nicholas Hayduk

It’s been too long since I’ve posted! With all of the virtual conferences taking place in 2020, I couldn’t find the time to get any blog posts done. But I plan to change that in 2021. First off, I want to share a solution for when you want to use the Condition type of Web Form Steps, but your condition is more complicated than just checking if a regular field equals a specific value.

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Power Apps Portals: Notes vs Timeline Metadata – Comparison

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

In this series of blog posts, I’m looking at the ways to enable an asynchronous conversation between Dynamics/Power Apps users and portals users. The two most common techniques I see use Entity/Web Form Metadata – either the Notes or Timeline metadata option. This post covers a comparison between the two.

Power Apps Portals: Notes vs Timeline Metadata – Timeline Metadata Deep Dive

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

Power Apps Portals: Notes vs Timeline Metadata – Notes Deep Dive

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

Power Apps Portals: Notes vs Timeline Metadata – Introduction

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

In many cases, allowing for a “conversation” between your Dynamics/Power Apps model-driven app users and your Power Apps Portals users is a requirement for a portal. For example, once a description is entered into a Case, often a back-and-forth is required in order to lead to its successful resolution. In Power Apps Portals, the two primary ways to achieve this functionality is by leveraging either the Notes or the Timeline options of Entity or Web Form Metadata. In this series of posts, I’ll look at these options in more details.

Power Apps Portals: Related Entity as Source of Next Web Form Step

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

The Web Forms functionality lets you build complex multi-page, multi-entity wizard-style forms on your Power Apps Portals. And while there are a ton of options, it’s not uncommon to run into situations where you can’t do everything you want with configuration, so you might need to resort to a bit of JavaScript (and maybe even Liquid). One of those situations is if you want the source entity for the next step in your Web Form to be a record related to the entity of the current step.