Custom Entity icons for the Unified Interface

So, getting icons for your custom entities was relatively simple. You just needed to find an icon that was relevant to the purpose of the entity and it would have to satisfy the following guidelines:

  • For classic web application, a 16×16 pixel image in .gif, .png or .jpg formats
  • For entity forms, a 32×32 pixels image in .ico format (later these could be in .gif, .png or .jpg format as per the 16×16 image)

Some sites which provide useful sources of royalty free images, at no cost with or without attribution are:

With the introduction of the Unified Interface, a new approach is now needed as the image needs to be in the scalable vector graphic (.svg) format which, as the name suggests, can scale itself to suit different sizes as required. The issue is that a lot of sites that provide icons don’t cater for .svg files as the method for creating them isn’t quite as straight forward as fixed size images.

After trying a few sites that claim to automatically convert from standard image formats to svg, I couldn’t find one that provided usable results. Eventually I discovered an online image editor that allows images (eg. .png, .jpg) to be loaded, edited if required, and exported to a .svg file. The editor is the Method Draw SVG Editor and can be found at https://editor.method.ac/

The Method Draw SVG Editor

Start by changing the canvas size in the top right corner. Double click on each number and change them to Width: 32 and Height: 32.

Once the canvas has been resized, go to File > Import Image… Load the image you want to convert, make any adjustments as required and then go to File > Same Image… to save the image to a .svg file.

Resized canvas with File menu open

Once you have all of your icons in .svg files, the XrmToolbox () has a great add-in called Iconator which allows you to easily upload the images to D365 CE and associated each one with the relevant custom entities.

Hopefully this helps in adding that bit of pizazz to your systems.

Automating Releases for D365 & Power Platform – Episode 5 Reference Data

In this video, we use the Configuration Migration Utility to define which reference data should be extracted by our Azure DevOps Pipelines to take our data into version control (Git) ready for deployment to a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement / Power Platform CDS instance.

The configuration tools can be downloaded via https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/powerapps/developer/common-data-service/download-tools-nuget

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Automating Releases for D365 & Power Platform – Episode 4 Portal Deployment

In this video, we explore CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) using Azure DevOps Pipelines to take our portal configuration into version control (Git), package it up and deploy it to a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement / Power Platform CDS instance.

To download the configuration file for the portal contents mentioned in the video, please refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/admin/migrate-portal-configuration

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Automating Releases for D365 & Power Platform – Episode 3 Solution Deployment

In this video, we explore CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) using Azure DevOps Pipelines to take our solution contents from version control (Git), package it up and deploy it to a Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement & Power Platform CDS instance. We also look at how we can recall a solution from any point in time as the basis for our deployment.

To make things easier for you, below are the strings used to specify the source folder and

Source Folder of Solution to Pack:
$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/Azure_Source/D365_Solutions/$(SolutionName)

Solution Output File  and  Solution Input File:
$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\$(SolutionName).zip

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Automating Releases for D365 & Power Platform – Episode 2 Version Control

In this video, we explore CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) using Azure DevOps Pipelines to copy our Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement & Power Platform solutions to version control (Git) so that we can a) see what has changed over time and b) recall a solution at any point in time that was captured.

In the video, a couple of copy/paste blocks were used. I’ve provided them below for easy reference.

Powershell Script:

$date=$(Get-Date -Format 'yyyyMMdd')
Write-Host "##vso[task.setvariable variable=CurrentDate]$date"
Write-Host "Set CurrentDate to $date"

Command Line:

echo Commiting all changes
git config user.email "justin@notjust365.com"
git config user.name "Automatic Build"
git checkout master
git add --all
git commit -m "Automatic solution commit $(CurrentDate)"

echo Push code to repository
git -c http.extraheader="AUTHORIZATION: bearer $(System.AccessToken)" push origin master

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Display SP files in D365 CE using PowerApps and Flow

In this video, we look at how to use a PowerApp and a Flow to enhance the user experience of accessing related files from SharePoint within the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) screens.

As mentioned during the video, the URI for the Flow action ‘SharePoint – Send an HTTP request to SharePoint’ is
_api/web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl(‘incident/body(‘List_records’)?[‘value’][0]?[‘relativeurl’]‘)/Files
The text above in Bold/Italics is entered using Expression

Below are some references used in building this solution:

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/return-an-array-from-flow-to-powerapps-response-method/
https://preview.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/return-data-to-powerapps/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/model-driven-apps/pass-current-embedded-canvas-app

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