ecLearn - Learning Management System built on top of Microsoft Dataverse for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 users

ENGINEERED CODE BLOG

Power Pages: Are They Really Worth $2 per User per Month?

Posted on June 8, 2023 by Nicholas Hayduk

The price point for Power Pages has long been a tricky discussion point. The pricing model has changed a few times of the years, and organizations can feel frustrated if they are on the wrong end of who ends up paying less and more when the model changes. In this blog post, I’ll review the history of the pricing for the product, and provide my opinion on whether I think the cost is justified by the value.

Power Pages: Pro Code Techniques in the Templates – Custom Saving on Forms with JavaScript and Web API

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Nicholas Hayduk

Today we’re starting a new series of blog posts where I look at some of the more advanced developer techniques that appear within the new templates available for Power Pages. Some of the techniques I may like, other I may have alternatives for, but I’m hoping that if you read this series it will show you the possibilities of what can be done with Power Pages if you’re willing to get your hands dirty with a bit of code. In our first post, I’m going to look at the technique of using the Form functionality in Power Pages to layout the form itself, but then using custom JavaScript and the Web API to perform a custom save operation.

Power Pages: What Kind of JavaScript Should I Write?

Posted on April 11, 2023 by Nicholas Hayduk

While there is a lot you can do with the out-of-the-box capabilities of list and forms with Power Pages, pretty often on projects you do run into cases where you need more than what you can do with just configuration. In these cases, Liquid and JavaScript are often used to help you meet requirements. While there aren’t too many choice to make when using Liquid, the same can’t be said for JavaScript. In this blog post, I’ll look at some different options for writing client-side code with Power Pages.

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

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Nicholas Hayduk

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 Nicholas Hayduk

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.

Continue reading “Power Apps Portals: Adding Custom Styles to Legacy Front-Side Editor”

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.

Continue reading “Power Apps Portals: Web Forms with Complex Conditions”

Power Apps Portals: Customizing Date and Time Format on Notes and Activities

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

I’ve been working a lot with Notes and Timelines on the Portal recently, and it just so happens that I had a recent comment on one of my old posts asking about customizing how dates are shown when displaying notes. The code didn’t end up being too long, but it involves a couple different techniques that I thought were worth exploring a bit more in depth.

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.