ENGINEERED CODE BLOG

Power Pages: A Platform for ISVs?

Posted on September 20, 2023 by Nicholas Hayduk

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have been an important part of the Microsoft Business Applications space for a long time. ISVs create solutions that build on top of the platforms and products that Microsoft provides off-the-shelf. As the Power Platform has continued to grow and evolve, more opportunities have presented themselves for ISVs. In this post, I’ll look at what ISVs might want to consider when looking at incorporating Power Pages as part of their offering.

Power Pages: Pro Code Techniques in the Templates – Custom Search Interface Using JavaScript Redirects

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Nicholas Hayduk

This month I’m continuing my series on looking at how functionality is built into the new templates available for Power Pages. In this post I looking at the Program Registration template, which allows users to browse and sign up for classes, and is useful in scenarios such as an after school program. Specifically, I’m going to look at the functionality that allows users to search through the available classes.

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: 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: 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.

Power Apps Portals: Related Records Filtering on Lookups When Creating Records via Subgrid

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

The power of Entity Forms in Power Apps Portals is that they mirror much of the functionality available in model-driven apps (and Dynamics 365). While the parity isn’t 100%, one advanced feature that Entity Forms does support is Related Records Filtering on lookups, where the available options in the lookup are filtered by some other data that has already been selected. However, in certain cases, this functionality doesn’t offer exact parity out-of-the-box – one of those cases is when you are creating a new record via a subgrid, and you’re expecting that the parent record is used in the filtering of the lookup.

Power Apps Portals: Customizing the Rendering of Notes and Activities

Posted on April 16, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

I’ve always been an advocate for using CSS to control the visibility of out-of-the-box Power Apps Portals features. Unfortunately, sometimes CSS isn’t enough, and you do have use JavaScript. And even then, sometimes you have to resort to some exotic techniques – one of those times is customizing some aspects of how notes and activities are rendered on Power Apps Portals.