Power Platform Boost Podcast

Powerful Power Fx (#34)

• Season 1 • Episode 34

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[0:01] It's okay, you you just you just adopt whatever you just adopt whatever accent who you're talking to, i do i do so but i don't i still don't know the difference between american and canadian english i heard a comedian once and he really talked exactly the way that nicholas as Heyduk speaks. And so then I got the accent, but not with you. It's the O-T-U. That's the only thing that I can actually just pick up on. But HeyDuke's from Saskatchewan, so that kind of throws all books out of the window in terms of things, so. Okay. Generally, or just with the dialect? For everything. Okay, perfect.

[0:47] Music.

[1:06] Welcome, everyone, to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your weekly source of news and updates from the world of the Power Platform and the Microsoft community, with your hosts, Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I'm just trying to move you. Oh, there you go. I found the button because now I can see you. You're big and up top and then I'm small down. So that's way better. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. So you have a heat wave in Canada. We did. We had a heat wave last week and for the last two days, it's been rainy and cool again. And we had all sorts of thunderstorms and stuff yesterday, which is, I don't know, I find exciting, but, um, but yeah, right now it's pouring rain outside. So. Right. So maybe this is what we're getting because last week and this weekend, we just had rain and now it's, uh, it's looking like we're going to have 25 degrees in sun all week.

[2:11] Oh, cool. But we're not here to talk about the weather, are we? No, we always do. That's how we start because when we're back in our own home studios and not, this is the first time in a few episodes that we're actually back in our own regular spots.

[2:29] Yeah, this is per normal, but not per usual for the last couple of episodes.

[2:34] I do have something geo-related, actually, so I want to start off with that. Wow, segueing right in. Yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And it's actually been here for a couple of episodes, so it's quite old. But I feel like it deserves to be mentioned because I know that this is going to unblock so many customers and projects out there that the fact that you're now able to deploy pipelines across to your locations. Now, what does that mean? It means that you're now able to deploy solutions.

[3:12] Across environment regions. So if I have something created in Europe, I can now deploy that through Power Platform Pipelines lines through to Canada or North America? Is that the region? That's the region. We have our own region here, but North America, they have a bunch. They have like two or three, or I think it's just one geo, but there's different data centers and stuff like that. Of course, Canada, that's always a good pub quiz question that comes up is how many geo locations or geo tenants or whatever are there? And I never get it right because it's constantly changing. They keep adding them. I believe like they added what Norway last fall. Um, plus they keep adding other ones. So, and of course it doesn't always have all the features and this and that, but I know that this is something that I ran into because I set up my power, my pipelines, I set up my host and then I went to go add one of my environments and it couldn't come up in the list. And I'm like, why isn't it showing up? And of course, because I had my host pipeline environment sitting in Canada, and I wanted to move, I think, some from the US or Europe from one to another. And at that time, I couldn't do it. But it looks like now I'll be able to, which is super exciting.

[4:23] Yeah. And another thing, because this is something I've ran into a couple of times as well. You want to try something out when it's preview and it's only available in the US environment, for instance, or something along those lines. And then you have something that is working and you want it to move and you can't. So now you can. And yeah, good enhancement for sure. So check that out.

[4:44] Yes. Next one on the list is about Dataverse low-code plugins.

[4:51] Yeah. And that was from our friend David Wyatt, who, again, just, I mean, he's got super great blog posts and very, not just saying about this new feature or cheerleading your feature kind of gives a critical look to it. And he's talking about low-code plugins. And of course, he talks a little bit more what plugins are from the pro-code sense. I mean, anybody who's been working with Dynamics CRM or Power Platform and Dataverse knows plugins have been around since, like for the past, since 2000. Since the early versions of CRM 1.2, they were called different things. I think they were called call-outs originally, then plug-ins. And now, in terms of Dataverse development, it's just a regular thing. Now, to write plug-ins, of course, you know you need Visual Studio. You write it in C Sharp. You create DLLs and packages, and you outload those in Solution. So very much a pro-dev task, where sometimes some of the things that you want to do...

[5:48] Aren't maybe so super pro dev heavy. So then Microsoft came up with this concept of low code plugins, where it's an it's an app that runs within an environment. And you can go in there and write power effects code, essentially to do plugin type work, it creates a plugin actually. And then the benefits are its power effects. So it's supposedly low code, I'm still very much on the code is code, power effects, JavaScript, liquid, and we'll talk more about that. But, you know, it is what it is. But you can also use connections in there, which is something that to do in, you know, the regular plug-in development is a lot more difficult.

[6:29] But it has its limitations. And David in his blog post kind of points out some of these limitations and also some of the errors that are coming up that he ran into that people ran into. This is what I like about it. This is very much a real world situation kind of information. Um, blog posts where it kind of, it's not so much, here's this great new feature and people try it and get frustrated. It's like, here's this feature. It's great, but here are the things to look out for. And here are the things that I'm running into. Um, and kind of, this is something I think we all can relate to as we're building out our projects. So, um, definitely, you know, and, and low code plugins have been out for, you know, they're in preview for quite a little bit now. Um, I've kind of written some for certain things. I like the idea. Uh, I wish that we could actually filter on the field trigger right now the the plugins are triggered with the entire update or creative the entire record i can't filter it down the field level yet um that i could do in a in a pro code plugin but this is something i could actually dive in and start writing my plugin using the tools as opposed to setting up visual studio and all that stuff like i honestly i haven't written a plugin a pro code plugin in about four or five years now if i had to i could but it probably would take me about two or three days to do something that someone who has does this every day can probably do in 15 minutes. So this is just another entry point.

[7:52] Mostly tooling and just getting my headspace back into how to do it again because I haven't done it so long. It's like one of those things that if you do it every day, it's easy. If you do it every five years, it's easy after you get your head back into the groove again, which takes a while. You get rusty very easily on this. But could you start off with a local plugin, low-code plugin, and then evolve? So if you can't trigger it on a column, could you start off with a local plugin and then switch and kind of extend it with ProCode to make it trigger on a column, you think?

[8:31] That's a great question. I don't think so. I think you actually need to take a step back and rewrite it. I mean, of course, a lot of the logic, if you got that figured out, I mean, that applies. But in terms of writing the plugin, you'd have to start from scratch to do a ProCode. Any of the listeners can go and correct me if I'm wrong on that, because I haven't tried it, but that's my gut feeling anyway. It's probably coming, though. These things tend to start off easy and simple and then get more advanced as they go along. Yeah, so if we're talking, yeah, talking's easy with Power Fx and getting more advanced, then maybe this is a good segue into, they've added Power Fx to Power Pages in Preview Hero as well. Wow. So I took a little bit of a look at this and it is very basic at this point. I did a short video for those that are interested in that. But basically, yeah, it's you can do some power effects like. Basically, to do some of the stuff you would do in Liquid normally. So, for example, very simple, you know, when someone goes to a page and you want to personalize it like, hello, Adika, or hello, Nick.

[9:42] Based on, you know, in Liquid, it's still one line of code. It's, you know, user dot, you know, full name or something, if the user's logged in. So, this way, the example they showed was using the PowerFx formula. And will effectively do the exact same thing. But with Power Fx, you get access to all, you know, apparently access to all these functions and things. So they showed like the concatenate function to concatenate the hello and the full name and put that together. But then also with Power Fx, oh, you had a braid, a little light bulb went off. Yes. Did you see that light bulb? I did.

[10:16] Yeah, you're going to have to edit in a light bulb moment now because I'm actually struggling. I'm going to tell you what it is because we're doing a fetch. fetch i'm doing it on the project right now we have where i'm fetching a lot of different items and i'm going to loop through them and show them on the page and i want to group them by something and then i want to kind of just kind of query the array that i get back and in the liquid documentation it says that i'm going to be able to kind of go loop through all of these results where for instance a user location as a specific city it doesn't work so now i'm thinking maybe I can use Power Fx to create a formula that will give me that, that will return that for me instead. That's a really nice thing to try out. Yeah, you could try it out. Now, again, of course, the documentation gives you the regular, this is preview, you know, do not try on small children or pets kind of warning.

[11:14] But yeah, potentially, because the other thing with the other example was to be able to like to do like a simple record count, Again, you can do this in Liquid. I have a few questions about PowerPages and PowerFx. Nick, are you ready? I'm ready. I will answer the best that I can.

[11:32] Yeah, good. Okay, so when does it fire? Because we use Liquid. That renders when you load the page, it goes grab the data from Dataverse that you want to display. But if you want to modify that data, you have to go grab it again, refresh the page, or use the Web API. Api so with power effects is this the same thing yeah power effects runs server side the same as liquid does so when you configure your power effects to you know show some records or show some data it will all render it will all piece together on the on the server side and then what ends up in your browser is just pure html so um i actually showed that in my video i went and looked at the source of what's being showed in the browser and it's all html you don't see any power effects code, same as like liquid code, you can't see liquid code on your browser side. But if you look at the source code behind it, like in the design studio or visual studio code for the web, then you see the actual code there. Right. Including, yeah.

[12:36] So it doesn't refresh the cache either then. You're dependent on cache the same way you are with Lithwood. Yes. We're still... I was hoping for some revolutionary things here, but maybe not today. No, not really. Like, I think it's, it's really more, it's kind of does what it's a very, it kind of operates the same as what liquid does, but it can't do everything that liquid can right now. So I think what we're going to see is in the next few years.

[13:05] Still a heavy reliance on liquid. Liquid um and the question i kind of wonder myself is will power effects eventually replace liquid that's probably i'm i can't i can't i don't know for sure but i could speculate that's probably what microsoft is at least kind of hoping um but in the meantime because you know liquid is it is pretty powerful it's just not used anywhere else in the power platform ecosystem except in power pages so there's that question do we need to learn another language specifically just for power pages and yes right now you do um whereas if you know power effects from power apps um and other places then it's like okay then one language to kind of rule them all we'll see how this goes this is going to be an evolving thing like i said this is still preview they they do suggest do not use this on um production sites it is going to evolve um i think it's right now Now you can only add power effects code to like text or iframes or images or like just to hide and show images, that kind of thing.

[14:11] So we can't go in and start writing massive power effects code like in our, we could add into our web templates unless it's an image control that we add to the page kind of thing or a text control kind of thing. So it's still very, very early stages, but I'm cautiously optimistic that this could be a yet another kind of tool in the toolbox for building our power pages. And then, of course, that light bulb moment you had too.

[14:35] Yeah, maybe this could be another approach to get what you need for the particular problem that you're running into.

[14:42] Yeah. Only time will tell. In fullness of time, we will know. Isn't that what they say? Absolutely. Yep. And then again, because it's preview, we can provide our feedback on that. So this could be a scenario of like, I want to do this. And that's something we can feed back to the product team. Oh, definitely. Absolutely. And if anyone listening have any good use cases that they see and, you know, that they're used to using Power Fx4 that will be handy for five pages, we're all up for getting those suggestions. Yeah. And of course, using ideas. They keep referring us to ideas. Yeah. And one of the comments on, because when I posted about the video and blog that I wrote, one of the comments was about using Power Facts for doing things like hiding and showing fields and forms and things like that, whereas today, Power Pages. Yeah, there's slowly beginning to add a little bit of that metadata in there, but to do it, you still need to know JavaScript. So this is where, you know, the whole pro code versus low code comes in. I'm very comfortable with JavaScript. So when they were talking about adding Power Facts, I'm kind of like, why? I mean, I know JavaScript, you know, how is this going to help me? But I keep forgetting in the grand scheme of things, you know, Power Facts is supposedly a more approachable language. It is accessible from the design studio. So, yeah, if you can start adding that conditional formatting through Power Fx to the design studio, well, again, that's going to enable more people to be able to build Power Pages faster.

[16:11] Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And as long as we can do both until we learn it and it's fully grown, then, yeah, more than happy to switch over to Power Fx, to be honest, as long as it works.

[16:25] Yeah. And just to kind of move on a bit with the news and updates. So we're not really sure if this is new, but it was amazing to come across the COE Starter Kit architecture diagram that Nicholas Kerman did.

[16:41] Like I said, not really sure. I found it in the Power Wiki. Someone shared it on LinkedIn last week, I think. And for me to just go in and see all the different components and all the contents of COE Starter Kit. So you have a full overview of the different flows and the different apps that run that kind of comes with a kit and how it works and what it connects to. So if you're diving into COE certificate and you find it a bit hard to understand how it's all connected, that is really something to look into for sure. It kind of reminds me of the diagrams that Danny does for the different platform products, but it's just that visualization of something that is very abstract for a lot of people. That is a great resource. So well done, Nicholas Kerman, for putting on that. Yeah. And just because it's, you know, not necessarily newly published doesn't mean it's new to somebody. Like it was new to us, right? Exactly. There's so much content out there. Like, you know, we kind of pick out sort of the new stuff that comes through. But also we discover stuff. I'm sure everybody does. They discover stuff. And it's sort of like this, you know, maybe it's a two-year-old post. And like, where has this been all my life? It's a sort of exciting thing. So yeah, that's it. So if it was new to you, I'm sure it's new to a lot of our listeners as well. So check it out.

[18:03] Yeah, exactly. And something that is new is sequential approvals in Power Automate. And I saw a couple of people posted about it on LinkedIn. I've seen a couple of blog posts about it. And also Reza Durrani made a YouTube video that I really liked, where he kind of goes through how this used to be. And now you've got a new choice when you set up approvals in Power Automate that allow you to set up these in a sequence. So when you add an action and it's trigger an approval and wait for response, you now can set different, so you can actually do this on multiple levels. You can set one sequence with multiple email addresses, some divided by semicolon, and then you can add more sequences if you want. And if any of these reject the approval, then it kind of cancels the approval altogether. And if it goes through, then it's accepted. So it's one of those things that have really been a long wait, actually, for a lot of people to have that. So finally, it's here. And good job, Reza. And a very to the point and easy to follow video.

[19:15] Perfect. And I believe Matthew Devaney also posted a blog post on the same topic as well. So again, I love the content coming from different places. You get different perspectives on it. If you're more of a blog reader, Matthew Devaney's stuff is good. Of course, if you're more like a lot of people, YouTube, of course, Reza's stuff is amazing. So, yeah, there's just different, like, not only do we have this content, we're getting it in different formats, which is pretty cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and that is what I keep telling, you know, the juniors here. You told me always is that, you know, even if someone's already written about something or made a video about something, make it yourself again, because you will have a different perspective. You'll bring in some new ideas. And so, yeah, just keep making content.

[20:00] Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And also you saw something about how to work with complex data models. Well, really, it's kind of continue on where the discussion I had last week about working a little bit with these complex data models and tying it in, like, you know, my wish list to tie it in a mermaid format and everything like this. But now it looks like it's becoming more widespread in terms of before, up until last week, it was only on a preview environments, but now they're turning it on for other environments. And we're finally getting that ERD design view within PowerApps as we're building out our tables and making relationships and seeing the relationships that are there. To me, this is just so crucial. And again, I've said this probably 100 times, getting your data model right is crucial for your entire, your PowerApps, your PowerPages or your whole project. So, so now, now this is sort of now more available to everybody else to kind of try out for yourself and get to that. And it's interesting because this is something Microsoft Access has had for like since the 90s. So having this now power part of power, power platform and power apps is pretty cool. So yeah, interesting, interesting stuff here.

[21:16] Definitely and if you want to know i i got a question today actually we have um a couple of offices down in in this more southwest of europe and they were looking to meet for where to find more information and what events to attend and and they were thinking about maybe traveling up here to attend nordic summit and i said you know what there's a lot of things there's so many many community events around Europe. You don't really have to come here to get this kind of information. And it dawned on me that not everyone knows where to go to find a good overview of different events. And then as I'm looking at this and Googling in my LinkedIn feed, something from Chris Goodwill pops up where he's listed fantastic Microsoft events and where to find them. A huge PDF with links and a list of all the different events, community events and Microsoft specific events for different products and different spaces.

[22:14] A good summary. So, you know, easy peasy for me to just share that internally and go, you want an overview? Ta-da! Here you go. But I also wanted to share that with everyone else. And it's so fun to see how a lot of the conferences that we're involved with is also on the list. South Coast Summit here, Scottish Summit, Nordic Summit, EPPC, no, PPCC, and a lot of things, yeah, and a lot of other good resources as well. So if you're looking at going to an event or to take a course, you want to know what training to take, this is a good way to start to get Lay of the Land.

[22:57] And I commented on there adding to please add the Canadian Power Platform Summit as well to that list as we are now opening. We've opened up call for submissions. So if you're interested in speaking in Vancouver in next March, submit a session. My inbox has already exploded with a bunch, which is great, but always looking

[23:18] for more, whether you're a new speaker, established speaker. Speaker um if you're you know planning to kind of be in the vancouver area at that time or want an excuse to come to vancouver at that time um check that out so shameless self-promotion there for that yeah and that's going to be the weekend before mvp summit isn't it because but you know but do have they announced mvp summit yet because last year it was kind of announced around christmas yeah they did yeah they did actually at mvp summit they announced the dates so we got it all lined up for on top of it so if you're going to mvp summit and you want to stop by vancouver area on your way down to seattle then then cpbs definitely want to to submit sessions for or to attend yeah and uh yeah there's a lot of go ahead go on now what she's thinking about all the other things that we're going to do up until then because conference season we're just in the midst of conference season it's going to be a bit of a summer break i think for us here in the Northern hemisphere, but we're going to see each other in Vegas.

[24:24] Yes. I didn't think I was going to go. And then I was given the green light to go to Vegas to see PPCC and join you and Victor Dantas and Franco Musso on a workshop, Power Pages workshop on Monday. And I'm so excited about it. It's going to be so much fun. And it's, yeah, we're, we're, and we're all, it's, this Victor's got this theme. Are all the Top Gun Pro Pilots. So I've got my flight suit. You got to get yours yet, I believe. Victor's got his. Not sure where Franco's at. But yeah, we're going to be wearing Top Gun Flight, you know, because we're Pro Pilots. And we're going to help folks go through this flight training boot camp into Power Pages. And it's just going to be awesome.

[25:11] This is so Victor. I love it when Victor's in charge of marketing. It kind of goes all in. And it's just... Oh yeah, try to run an event with a... I know, I know. It's so much fun. Right. And we're going to do kind of a promo video thing, I think tomorrow or the next day. So before this episode actually is published, you're going to see a lot of ProPilot stuff out there, I believe. So keep those. And then of course we have Nordic Summit and Scottish Summit and then ACDC and all of the other events that we're so much looking forward to. It's going to be so much fun. Yeah, plus a few others that have been kind of tapped or pinged on to submit sessions for and everything. And I just finished doing four events in the last month, which were all amazing. Got to see a lot of great people. You know, Dynamics Minds was amazing. It was a Collab Days Netherlands, which was a fun one-day event, which was really cool.

[26:08] Resco.next, where I did a really cool online thing with Lisa. I think we might have talked about it the last episode. I'm not sure. I think we talk about this every single episode. I think people are actually a bit tired of hearing about all our travels and all our conferences, really. But yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, you're right. So there was, yeah, the last one was EPPC, which was cool too, but it was sort of, yeah, they were anyways, but looking forward to the other ones. And that's it. And the other thing too, is like, if you, if you're, if you're other options as well, and this is something I, this is not on our thing, but I just thought I'd mention it. But this past week, I attended the Power Platform community call. And there's a series of calls that are out there that are held either biweekly or monthly.

[26:53] And they're very well attended. They have really cool sessions, like usually 15 to 20 minute little segments on particular things. This past week, there was some on Power Pages, stuff on, you know, I think model driven or was it model driven app designs? Anyways. Always good stuff. So we'll put the links in there. If you've not seen those, definitely check those out. Run by David Warner out of Microsoft. And man, that guy's full of energy. Just sort of be prepared when you get on the call. He's just sort of like, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, like rah, rah, rah, rah.

[27:29] It's in my calendar and I try to attend it every week. It's hard because it's just in the afternoon, just when the kids come home from me. So it's always a bit tricky to get time to attend it. But definitely something to watch out for. And they usually also show a bit of news in terms of what's coming, especially on the partner call. I think that's Thursdays. Every other Thursdays, they have a partner call kind of thing where they actually show some stuff that are coming that are no longer

[27:57] on the NDA, but not really announced or published. So if you want to get a bit ahead of the crowd, that's also something to watch out for. And we'll put links to where you can get those into your calendar in the show notes, of course.

[28:11] And we're looking at the next episode being July 10th. That's a middle of the summer holidays for me, but we'll keep on doing this. We're not going to take a summer holiday from podcasting because it's a lot of fun and hopefully it gets a lot of content as well. And also I'm just now, like I asked you before we went online and recorded,

[28:30] when is the release wave going to be released? Because if we get, as we usually do the release waves a bit before everyone else, Then we'll record a special episode with a release wave notes for you specifically for Power Platform and release it when it's no longer NDA. So keep looking out for that. Usually our most popular episodes for that. So I'm looking forward. So I haven't seen that pop up. So if it's not the next episode, it'd probably be the one after. So we'll see how the…, See what happens. I think it's Microsoft's end of year this week. So that's probably the focus.

[29:09] And then it's July 1st. Yeah. July 1st is New Year's Day to the point where like our friend Daniel Lakowitz, who, yeah, hopefully you get to the end of this episode. It's funny because he was pigging me over the weekend. He was like making some comments on our last episode. I said, did you get to the end yet? We do a shout out to Daniel.

[29:29] He says his drive isn't long enough. Let's do that every episode. We should do that every episode now. Shout out to Daniel and Thomas and all the other people that we know are not listening to this podcast. And see how long it takes before they're actually all listening to your name. That's one way to get the subscriber base up. Yeah, and usually the release notes. The release notes usually end of July, start of August. So we'll see if you can get that recorded over the summer. Yes. Great. I think that's the end of the line for this episode. Thank you so much for listening and watching, everyone. And we'll catch you on the next one. Have a lovely summer. Catch you on the next one. Bye. Yay. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening. And if you liked this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. Make sure to leave a rating and review your favorite streaming service. And it makes it easier for others to find us. Follow us on the social media platforms and make sure you don't miss an episode. Thanks for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts, Ulrika Akerbeck and Nick Dolman, and see you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news.

[30:37] Music.


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