Power Platform Boost Podcast

We ❤️ Flow (#41)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman

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Events

European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Stockholm, Sweden from September 24 -27, 2024.

 

Nordic Summit

Top Gun Power Pages workshop

September 27-28

 

Scottish Summit

Aberdeen, October 18-19, 2024




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[0:00] That's awesome and we had a daily stand-up call with you the morning before you were supposed to weigh in and i don't think i've seen you that cranky before and but that was just over the top we were talking about after it's like is he gonna be okay yeah yeah i said yeah yeah just wait because he hasn't eaten so he'll be okay eventually but that was oh that was next level cranky.

[0:23] Music.

[0:44] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast, Your timely source of Power Platform news and updates with your hosts, Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk. Hey. Hey. How are you? I'm doing good, thanks. In another exciting bi-weekly pile of a whole bunch of things that we keep thinking, oh, we're not going to have enough. And then I look at the list and we have a ton again, as always. As always. And you had an exciting week. You were competing in the nationals for your powerlifting. How did it go? It went well in terms of I got two golds and a silver. So happy about that.

[1:36] Thanks. In terms of what I am capable of and the numbers I know I can do, not close to what I want. But that's just powerlifting in general. You always want more. You always think you can do more, but it is what it is. I'm happy. I'm pain-free. That is the main thing. I didn't re-injure myself. My shoulder did not act up at all. Even in the bench press competition, because I hadn't been training, me and my coach had to pull some shenanigans. And I'm not going to get into all the details because you really have to understand powerlifting and shirts and training and putting them on and whatever. But put it this way, it was a whole big chaotic thing. I did my first lift, jumped in the back, threw in the shirt, tried this, tried that, boom, went up my second attempt, missed it, my butt was up, boo-doo, went back in, third attempt, got it, happy. Oh, wow. Sounds like a lot.

[2:30] With the first item on the list is for you. Yeah, Copilot Power Platform Admin Center. This is a blog post. They're talking about a new feature that's coming up. It's beginning to light up. Maybe it's lit up already. But again, talking about, of course, Copilots are everywhere. We're well aware of it. And this is providing a place for educational resources, usage insights, governance controls, content moderation, to make sure you have

[2:58] responsible AI principles and practice. Practice um so of course now that these tools are becoming more and more mainstream of course the governance tools and all of this stuff is following along um and yeah we're beginning to see more and more like yes co-pilots were a thing people thought they were a fad but i think now i'm beginning to see in projects customers are beginning to ask we want to start using co-pilots into our actual applications and our business applications so it's becoming real folks it is going like a rocket but uh co-pilot's a thing i think it's beginning to settle down to the stuff that's going to be very useful but also there's a lot of concerns around security and governance and of course just making sure because we saw probably in the news as well about um things being hacked and you know emails being read and that kind of stuff so um yeah lots of cool stuff but that was the first thing yeah so check out we're going to have a link in the show notes and read all about the co-pilot page in the Power Platform Admin Center.

[3:59] Yeah, I think it's lighting up on my end. And also today I was diving into the new Power Automate Flow admin panel site, which you can get to from the Power Automate Studio. That gives you kind of an overview of all your flows in your environment, and which fails, which runs, and then you see a dashboard and that kind of thing. And it's very helpful to kind of get that across because, you know, a big project, you have multiple teams working on things separately. And for one person to be able to kind of govern that across everything, that's so important. So really good to see that light up. Um, and yeah, and next one on the thing is all the way down there. Yeah. So we're talking about co-pilot studio. Um, I, have you seen Alita, Alisa Benitez series on the, uh, the building? Eliza?

[5:00] Eliza? Sorry. Eliza. Eliza. I have not seen it yet, but I have seen Eliza's videos before and they are next level. She is. And, and Eliza in person, uh, she is, she's a bundle of energy. She's a really good friend out of New Zealand. And yeah, I'm looking.

[5:16] Anyways, I'm looking forward to seeing Eliza in November at one of the conferences there. But yeah, tell me all about her stuff. Yeah, she has a video series. Yeah, and I absolutely love Eliza as well, and especially her presentations as well. She makes great presentations. So absolutely a big fan and also a good friend of mine. So I watched her series on how to build with CodePilot Studio. So I just wanted to highlight it. She released, I think, episode three this week. It's on LinkedIn. I'll give you the link to how to create. So this time around, it was about creating a topic or add a topic to create a prompt and then defining prompt settings and testing the prompt and configuring the rest of the topic. So what she does is she has those variables that you kind of tie to Dataverse data, and she shows how you can then format how the response is supposed to look. So that's a very good thing. And I think it applies to a lot of use cases, especially with our customers. We hear that all the time is that they want to kind of control what the user sees, what they get back and how that's formatted. It's a very common request. So I think this really showcased that pretty well. So yeah, we'll have the links to that, of course, in the show notes for you to watch.

[6:39] And then the next one is, it's on your list as well. I saw that Power Automate, get first item in the list from Dataverse. Now, how many of us have done this the wrong way? So please tell the people the right way. Absolutely. I discovered this, I think, just a couple of months ago myself, because you have a list of Dataverse. You use the list from Dataverse action. And then, of course, you get a list of records back. And even though you limit it to one, so you know that you're going to get one response and you're going to get the first one, if you try to use the values that you get from that response in any way, shape, or form, you'll get an apply to each. So it wants to loop through it. Now, the way to get around that is by creating an action using a compose or tie to a variable where you have the function saying first something, something, and then you kind of go in and get your variable. That will not create and apply to each. It will just give you that specific value. And you can do that for multiple variables or parameters if you want. So it's a very nice and easy blog post by Arun Puthi that you can go in and check out if this is something that you've run into because that is something we do all the time.

[7:56] It sounds like that you've looked at a lot of Power Automate flows the last couple of weeks and maybe noticed a few less than favorable practices. And can I just please then also include another tip? If you have a condition, right, you have a condition, you check for something, then you have a true or a false. I see that so many times, especially with the juniors and people learning Power Automate, you're inclined to do the following. You're inclined to say if something that values false, then you have your actions inside the false. And if it's true, you add your action inside the true. Now, if you have a complex role, that's going to create a branch or a bush or God knows what. Now, if something is redeemed false, you should, of course, handle that in the false on the right side. But if that renders true, it will simply continue downwards to your next action below the conditions. You don't need to put that inside the true box. You can simply put it underneath. That creates a much cleaner, much easier flow to read and to manage. And also using scopes is a very good way to kind of folder and kind of, I don't know, create more of a structured and organized flow. A modular flow and stuff and of course like it also using child flows and things like that like.

[9:25] There's but of course it's like power power automate it's easy to use which is a good thing but it's easy to use which is a bad thing so yeah a lot of see a lot of this stuff it's funny we talk about like my uh my weekly text exchange with our good friend daniel lakowitz and this was a bit of an argument between him and i at the uh the design studio with best practices and things like that so i know daniel's very much pro new environment new new studio i'm still stuck a little bit in the old one um but again all of these things come up with with best practices and that kind of stuff and i must say i'm i'm leaning more and more towards the new studio and the fact that it kind of opens up all the actions when you open it up because we were going through a flow earlier today you and me a massive one at that and when in the old studio you have to go in and open every single scope and every single apply to each and it's very hard or it's very easy to kind of overlook a step because we were looking through connection references to see that we updated all of them and then it becomes more of a scavenger hunt more than anything while it's in a new design you get that overview and you can kind of zoom out to see what you're actually dealing with so that's one thing that i i like about the new one um but yeah i uh it's very easy to make simple mistakes that kind of clunk everything up. And also I see the big flows doesn't necessarily have to be, people have an inclination to think, oh, if I have a massive flow.

[10:53] Then I need to divide it into separate child flows.

[10:58] Well, that doesn't really help anything because it's going to take the same amount of credit as the same amount of time or even longer if you divide it up into smaller pieces. The time when you want to divide a power automate into smaller pieces and use child flow, if you have something that is doing the same work over and over, if you can, if you look at it as if there's any time where you need to reuse that flow somewhere else or that scope or that work, that's the scenario where you want to kind of modular out that as a child flow and just use that multiple times instead. So, but it's of course, case by case and we are still learning as well and I am yeah I absolutely love Porotomy I must say the more I work with it the more I like it.

[11:44] Oh, yeah. As much as I know I'm a PowerPages guy, I've told people when they ask me what's my favorite tool, hands down, Power Automate, because the amount of things that can do. It's one of these things, if I could send a tool back to my past self when I was first speaking to CRM, it would be Power Automate, hands down, because there's so many things over the years that we've had to fend angle and build and clunky interfaces that Power Automate would have just solved so easily. Leak so i know and yeah and i was talking to another colleague of ours the other day and he was kind of grumpy and because now with all the connection references we have to do work a certain way and it's a bit of a hassle but then he kind of caught himself and he said but man that thing's powerful i was like yeah because yeah we're kind of grumpy about yeah it's a bit difficult to get everything in a huge project to work but man if we had to do this by code that's going to be so So much work, right? So you just have to check yourself every now and again. Be like, oh yeah, it's Powerful.

[12:45] And speaking of Powerful and Power Platform's biggest competitor, you found something for Excel this week. What I just saw this week, put out by our good friend Jonas Rapp, of course, out of Sweden. Super great guy, super smart. Jonas, we absolutely love the work you do. And with Fetch XML Builder, of course, if you're working in the Power Platform, form, if you're writing reports, or even if you're doing power automate that we were just raving about, for doing any kind of development, of course, you're doing using fetch XML, if you're still going the old way by doing an advanced find and exporting it that way, like, seriously stop, get next term toolbox, install fetch XML builder, And use that because it just allows you to, you know, find data very easily, find different things, build your whole fetch XML structure, filtering, and then even getting like OData parameters and all this other fun stuff. So it's so indispensable. And then even just to find data, even if you're not building anything, even if you don't need the fetch XML, just to find data, to do searching, to get some goods. It does all of this cool stuff.

[13:53] Now, Jonas has added the ability to export to Excel. So this is just going to open up huge doors in terms of data migration, in terms of troubleshooting data, trying to find data, organize data, even if you needed to. Someone says, I need a list of something, something. This is, you know, to do this within FetchXML Builder is just going to be absolutely awesome.

[14:13] So I am super excited about this new feature. And thank you, Jonas, for all that you do and for FetchXML Builder. And if there's one thing I could ask our listeners in the community in XRM Toolbox, whether it's Fact Check, Sunil Build, or some of the other tools, there is a donate button there so you can donate something. Just buy Jonas a beer, buy him a pizza, or even just provide feedback. I've talked to these developers before. What they're looking for is just feedback. How can we make those tools better? What do you like? What do you don't like?

[14:46] So, yeah, support our community because this is a free tool. Like really, Jonas could charge hundreds upon thousands of dollars for this particular tool and totally get it, be totally worth it. But he doesn't. He just does it for free. So check out that new feature, export to Excel.

[15:04] Yeah. And yeah, it's amazing when you look at it like that, because the amount we rely on the Xtrem toolbox so much, especially Fetch XML Builder and those kinds of tools. I don't think I could do my job at this point without it. And it's from the community. They do this as their hobby. Yeah, so please donate to make sure it keeps going. Just to give them some encouragement. We should just do our favorite tools episode one day, maybe. You know, when it's a slow news week, maybe. Didn't we do a boost quest on that once? I think we actually did a boost quest on it. Oh, that's right, we did. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and the slow week. What world do you live in? It's not going to be a slow week ever. No. No. All right. So this week, I came across something that is a bit on the edge of what we usually do. So this is more of a highlighting someone doing great content. I saw a blog post from a woman called Monica Andrea Perez. It's probably not said like that, but it just looked like that to me. And it's about human resources model of an app for finance and operations and project.

[16:20] No, sorry. Dynamic 365 human resources app and finance and operations. Operations and it's a it's a model driven app that is meant to make expenses and no sorry permissions for leaves and and that kind of thing from place easier and she kind of goes through how you the prerequisites you need and how to install it and what to do with it so it's more of a showcase of an app it's which is in preview more than anything but i found that she written a lot of blog posts about human resources especially that app and also finance and operations in general. So if that is content that you're missing out on, that you need to dive into more, check out Monica's content because she writes very good blog posts.

[17:05] Awesome. Yeah. No, I know we don't talk about Dynamics 365 all that often, but it is very much part of the Power Platform.

[17:11] So yeah, that's, that's great. And we'll probably, and especially now I'm seeing more and more projects of people building model driven apps or even Canvas apps that do tap into Dynamics finance and operations. So our worlds are colliding or merging or whatever. So we need to be on top of speed as well. So I don't. Yeah, we do. And I see so much. Yeah. Business Central as well. So it's it's coming our way. It is coming. Speaking of big things, our friend Elena from Australia, Elena Grishenko.

[17:50] She wrote a pretty interesting blog post about the uploading large files. Now, a few weeks ago, I did a video and a blog post about the ability, the new ability to upload large files. Of course, I just showed more of the configuration side of it. I did point to there is documentation around the Web API. Alayna has dug deeper, and she's gotten into the code a little bit because she had a specific use case about downloading these files from the user side. And so doing this, she did dive deeper into the Web API code and gave some good examples and some sample code in her blog post. And like she said, it is a bit of a work in progress. but uh this is again another elena's a great contributor to the community and i know this i think this is the second week in a row we're talking about her stuff and about how she's diving into this and i know that elena works on projects so she takes again like everybody in the community she takes what she's learning in a project and sharing that because if she's running into it other people are going to run into it or running into it now so um thanks elena elena And even has, she's talking about the upload file chunk,

[18:58] talk about chunks last week. So a lot of cool stuff. And all the code is in there too. So check out her blog post on that. Thank you, Alina. Yeah. Great job. And also another thing on PowerPages.

[19:16] Yeah, I think this has my name on it, but I thought you found it, but that's all good. Maybe we both found it and I put it in first. I don't know.

[19:26] But this is on Mike Carlo, or yeah, Michael Carlo, talking about using a custom rich text files table to store images. Because he sort of talked about the fact that normally if you're setting this up, you're using the MS Stein rich text files table. Table and of course i've just been working on the content for our top gun all about security and table permissions and things like this realizing we apply table permissions to a particular table that's going to expose everything in that table depending on how you go about it so he talks about creating a custom uh custom table the structure around it how to do the parent entity and then basically how to configure that um within within the model driven side and And then be able to apply that into the portals or PowerPages side and rendering it with liquid and all of that kind of fun stuff. So another great, Michael's been putting out a lot of great content along PowerPages plus a few other things. So again, this is another great post. It's really cool to see a lot of folks that are coming in like the PowerPages blog. Every week, there's a whole bunch of different blog posts about PowerPages specifically. And you and I have talked about this many times about how years ago there really was a very small community of us. Well, that community is growing all the time. It's really exciting to see and beginning to show the maturity of this product itself.

[20:45] It's not just a little niche thing that Microsoft bought. It is actually becoming a full-fledged thing. And I can, I know that even seeing my LinkedIn inbox of people looking for PowerPages resources, it's crazy. So if you're, um, yeah, if there's something to ramp up on, I've all, I mean, I've always said ramp up on PowerPages, but if you, if you're,

[21:05] if you want to find some good work, uh, there's plenty of work out there. So again, thanks Michael for, for, uh, for, for this particular blog post.

[21:16] It's a very good one. And then something that we have done a lot of work on lately as well, Power Platform Pipelines and how to do automated testing. I discovered this week a post from Suparna Banerjee. How would you say that? I would say it's Suparna Banerjee. Banerjee? Yeah. I'm sorry. sorry, we're very bad with these names. And we don't mean it if we say them wrong. We just, it's hard sometimes.

[21:53] And she went through, her blog post is about how to set up a Canvas app with some validation and then set up a test case that goes through and kind of inputs data. You use the testing studio to kind of record you're testing the app, and then you can add that to the pipeline. So as the pipeline runs, it will run your test to validate that this thing that you put in still works. I think that was brilliant. And I really haven't looked into the testing studio a lot.

[22:28] So that was really most of all, it's a good blog post. It was very easy to follow. But also thank you for kind of pointing that out and putting my attention, Putting that to my attention, bringing that to my attention about that testing capability embedded into Canvas apps. So, yeah, if that's something you need to look into, you'll get the show notes, links in the show notes.

[22:54] Yeah, for sure. And like I've been digging into pipelines and running flows and things, and I got some content coming in terms of updating authentication providers and everything. I think the more I'm looking into pipelines, yes, I know it's not Azure DevOps pipelines, it's the Power Platform pipelines. And the more I dig into it, the more I get excited about what's coming and what's there and what you can do and just a member of exporting and importing solutions and use pipelines, press a button. Now, it does get a little disheartening when you come back a few hours later on a big import job and see that little failure and you got to dig into it. But at least now, you know, with tying into power automate things, we can get those alerts and messages. So at 2 a.m. when it fails, you can get up and fix it then if you have your alerts on. I don't, by the way. Yeah, you need to create that flow that kind of create that big ding and call your phone. Just ding, Nick, you need to wake up. Your pipeline's not failed.

[23:57] And yeah, no, but it's good. And I can't wait to see that content because we're doing some work in terms of power pages and identity and stuff.

[24:05] And yeah, it's something that we know that other people are struggling with. So stay posted, people, for that. Now, last but not least, because we're at the bottom of the list now, I spotted Steve Bourdieu, our good friend Steve. I hope to see him in Vegas next week. He put out a blog post with a bounty of $500, U.S. Dollars, for the coolest U.S. dollars, the coolest PCF component, or control, sorry.

[24:40] And like he said, he's so disappointed to see so many PCF controls and so little creativity. Creativity they are all just sliders and buttons and we talked about knobs and switches right he wants to see something a bit more creative and he's willing to pay for it so the challenge is create the coolest toughest nicest most most creative pcf control and and bring it to steve's attention and maybe you win the money i think it's that easy and he also posted a link to guido I don't put it as a PCF gallery website where, of course, you have all the PCF components and controls. So I guess you have to post it there and make it available and send it to Steam to win the money. And it is the one that Steve likes the best. So if you're smart, reverse engineer that a bit. Yeah, exactly. Steve likes motorcycles and things like that. And yeah. Yeah. And also, yeah, I noticed I saw Steve's rapid, again, Steve is not a sponsor or anything, but his rapid start got some the Microsoft certification for an app or something. So congratulations, Steve. I know that's a lot of work and a lot of oops. So congratulations to your new team for getting that. But of course, yeah. 500 bucks. I'm like, Hmm.

[26:06] Maybe I've got to learn how to build a PCF control to get that. Maybe, maybe. We do know some people that are quite good at that, so I'm not going to try to compete with them. And speaking of conferences, I'm on my way to Las Vegas as we speak to be a part of the Power Platform Community Conference where we have a workshop and a session. And I'm going to go to all the co-pilot and AI sessions that I can find just to really absorb it. I think it's time that I get on the bandwagon. But that's not the only conference that is happening around in September. We have, in a couple of weeks, we have Nordic Summit in Oslo. 50 tickets left. 50 tickets left. So if you haven't gotten your ticket already, you have to get it. And we're recording this a bit early. So by Wednesday, maybe it's already sold out. Who knows? And after that, we have... People were turned away at the door last year, right? Yes, people had flown in, booked hotel, got to the venue, and were not allowed to go in because of fire regulations.

[27:18] Yeah. Yeah, that's hard. Because they think that they can just show up and then the people let them in.

[27:23] Sorry, you can't because of fire regulations. So get your ticket, people. And we're going to be there, and we're going to do the workshop, the Top Gun workshop, and we're going to do a session. Do we have a session? What are we doing? Are we doing anything on our neck? No. I have a session with Errol, who's a group we work with. Yes, you do. Yeah, and I am a sponsor, so...

[27:47] Oh, do you? Okay. No, not doing it. And apparently, and apparently you told me you had told me I'm doing podcast interviews or something. So I haven't got any details, but I'll be there. So yeah, no, I'm just putting you in the room and I'm putting a microphone in your face and I'm going to shove people in the door and then you're going to talk to them like yours do. It's going to be fine. Don't worry about it, but just don't make other plans. So do your session with IRL and then yeah, I'll do. I have a sponsored session. I'm going to talk about the Red Cross project in terms of PowerPages and what you can do because we've created a PowerPages site that looks exactly like the Figma sketches that they used for the React app that we've replaced. So that's a really cool session that you should definitely check out.

[28:30] And I'm so excited about your session with Ariel because you're talking about a topic that is very dear to me and the culture of that project team that we are on. It's absolutely fantastic i love to work with those those guys those people those girls and boys oh it's a pleasure so um i'm definitely gonna cheer you on right and and then you know this fall is going to be jam-packed we talked about all this events um all the time so we can to kind of wrap it up and talk more about them next time yeah we'll have the links in the show notes but yeah there's there's if there's probably an event close to you pretty much every week uh or coming up in the next couple months and can i just plug something please am i allowed because for nordic summit it's another podcast because for nordic summit we're doing a podcast series that we recap the 2023 event and the the episode that we're publishing on monday is with a very good friend of yours, Jacob Baila from Bresco.

[29:39] We interviewed him about what it's like to be a sponsor and why you would sponsor a community event. And his answer might surprise you because it does not have to do with the stand or the logo in the presentation or the session that you get.

[29:53] His answer is a completely different one and I absolutely love it. And he's comparing the community to an italian family dynamic don't you just love that and he's such a fun guy and i've talked with jacob so many times over emails and chats and and in in at nordic summit we'll finally meet in person i'm so excited about it and he talks about you as well in the episode.

[30:15] So uh that's a little plug for everyone to go check that out because that is released before this episode so it will be out by the time that this is released so check out nordic summit on on Spotify and everywhere else where you get your podcasts to hear that interview with Jacob.

[30:32] Cool. Yeah. Jacob's such a good guy. Oh, I love that guy. Love you, Jacob. Love you, Jacob. I love all of you guys. Really, we do. And thank you for listening to this podcast. It means the world to us. And our next episode will be October. October already? I thought it feels like we should start. Isn't that crazy? That's nuts. Are you sure you got that right? Because you're the one that put that date in. And when I saw that, I thought, surely that can't be right. Well, maybe I'm wrong. But yes, that would be Cobra Seconds. So maybe. So that's after Nordic Summit then. Yeah. Yeah. What? Time flies when you're having fun. Maybe the next episode we'll be able to do it together, like in the same space. Actually, what's going to happen is the next episode is going to be the Nordic Summit recap, my friend. Yes, there we go. Perfect. There we go. Oh, yeah, we know what we're doing. Yeah, of course. We got this planned. We got this in the bag. We know what we're doing by now. All right. There's something going wrong every time we do this, and that's the way we want it to be. It's never going to be perfect, you guys. Don't expect it to be perfect. We don't want it perfect. It will not be AI perfect, which is not perfect. But this one, I think if we work hard, we can get it under 30 minutes.

[31:53] Challenge. I believe in you, Nick. I believe in you. Do your magic. All right. I'm going to make it 30 minutes and one second just to piss you off.

[32:05] Oh, that's so typical you. Of course you will. Right. Okay. I'll catch you later and have an awesome weekend. Bye. Bye. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. And be sure to leave a rating or a review on your favorite streaming service. That makes it easier for others to find us.

[32:29] Follow us on social platforms and make sure you don't miss a single episode. Thank you for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts, Luric Akebek and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

[32:46] Music.


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Nick Doelman

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Ulrikke Akerbæk

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