ENGINEERED CODE BLOG

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 Apps Portals: Modifying Option Set Options on an Entity Form

Posted on March 12, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

If you’ve come from the world of Dynamics 365 (or CRM…) and are starting to work with Portals, it can be frustrating when you discover that client-side JavaScript code that works great in your model-driven app doesn’t work on a Power Apps Portal – especially because Entity Forms and Web Forms are marketed as a technology that exposes your existing forms to the web. This post we look at why it doesn’t translate, and provide some code that solves a common request: modifying the available options in an option set.

Power Apps Portals: Print Invoices

Posted on March 5, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

The topic of my first Portals Community Call back in January was the how to build a portal that allows a customer to view and print invoices. While solutions for this has been described by others (including Megan V. Walker’s excellent post), I also presented a different approach that I thought was worth covering in a blog post so that I could get a bit more into the technical details.

Power Apps Portals: fetchxml Liquid Tag and Entity Permissions

Posted on January 16, 2020 by Nicholas Hayduk

The fetchxml Liquid tag is arguably the most powerful Liquid tag in Power Apps Portals – it allows you to meet complex requirements for the display of data. But, if you combine it with a complex Entity Permissions model, you could find yourself getting unexpected errors. In this post I’ll cover what can cause those errors, and how to work around them.

PowerApps Portals: Liquid and JavaScript – Better Together!

Posted on October 31, 2019 by Nicholas Hayduk

PowerApps Portals offers two primary languages for customization: JavaScript and Liquid. This leads to confusion as to which technology should be used when – I’ll try to clear up some of that confusion in this blog post, as well as demonstrate that is many cases, the best option is a combination of the two.

PowerApps Portals: Knowledge Articles and Liquid

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Nicholas Hayduk

There are some areas of PowerApps Portals that are still implemented using either ASP.NET MVC or ASPX, instead of via Web Templates, which means the configurability options are limited – one of those is the Knowledge Base (which exposes Knowledge Article entities). Often we can use Liquid and JavaScript to customize some of these areas, but there is one thing in particular that makes doing this for the Knowledge Base challenging – in this post I’ll explain what that is, and how to get around it.

Dynamics 365 Portal: How Does the Entity Form or Entity List Get on the Page?

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Nicholas Hayduk

A topic I find that often leads to confusion for those new to Dynamics 365 Portal development (and even for those who have been doing it for a while) is the various options for displaying an Entity List or an Entity Form on a page. So in this week’s post, let’s look at the options.

Dynamics 365 Portal: Conditional Action Buttons on Entity Forms and Lists

Posted on January 2, 2019 by Nicholas Hayduk

A question was asked on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Community forums about how to hide or show a workflow action button based on the current user’s role, and since there are a few different ways to do this, I thought it was worthy of a blog post.

Dynamics 365 Portal: Using Liquid to Create Conditional Entity Forms

Posted on December 10, 2018 by Nicholas Hayduk

During last week’s eXtreme365 event in Austin, Texas, I was lucky enough to co-present a session with Nikita Polyakov (a Senior R&D Solution Architect at Microsoft, with a focus on Dynamics 365 Portal implementations). One of the tips he mentioned during the session was about using Liquid to decide which Entity Form to display on a page – it’s a very cool technique that seems to be underused. Then, a question showed up on the Dynamics 365 Community forums where that technique could be used to solve the problem. So I figured I’d write a quick blog post to get the word out on using Liquid to determine which Entity Form to display on a page.

Inconsistent Behavior of Liquid in the Custom JavaScript Attribute on Entity Lists in Dynamics 365 Portals

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Nicholas Hayduk

While working on my series about all the places you can put your code in a Dynamics 365 Portals implementation, I ran into an odd quirk with regards to how Liquid is handled in the Custom JavaScript attribute of Entity Lists. I did a bit of digging, and was able to figure out why in some instances, Liquid code is evaluated as you’d expect, and in other cases, it is not.