Softomotive's WinAutomation (RPA Tool) Installation Process

Install WinAutomation (RPA Tool)

1.       Download the WinAutomation installer. => https://www.winautomation.com/download/

WinAutomation Download Page

2.  Run the WinAutomationSetup.exe file. This file is likely in your Downloads folder.

3. Follow the instructions in the WinAutoma tion installer to complete the installation. During installation, ensure the License Type is set to Microsoft Power Automate. Choose web browsers to install extension.

Run WinAutomationSetup.exe 

WinAutomation Installation Wizard

WinAutomation License Type - Microsoft Power Automate

WinAutomation - Web Extensions

WinAutomation Successful installation 

4    Enable Softmotive Automation browser web extensions in Edge, Chrome, Mozilla (chosen  during installation).

Enable Softmotive Automation browser extension

Sign in to WinAutomation Console

1.    After the installation completes, start the WinAutomation Console from the Windows start menu.

2.    The application will start and prompt you to login. Enter the user credentials you use for Power Automate. If you don’t have a valid license, you will see this error message.

WinAutomation Console Login

3.    You will need your tenant administrator to grant consent to use your Power Automate Work or School account with WinAutomation. For that, your admin needs to install WinAutomation, sign in with their tenant administrator account, and then grant consent.

WinAutomation Console - Grant consent

4.    When you are asked to create a Master key during sign in, create one.

5.    Once signed in, you will see the WinAutomation console with a few example Processes. To get started, go to Options > Help > Getting Started, and then go through a few examples of creating simple Processes or check out 

Dual Write Microsoft Plugin Assemblies in CDS

Microsoft Plugin Assemblies related to Dual Write in CDS/CRM

Following are the plugin assemblies gets registered/deployed through Dual Write solutions and manage synchronization/integration of required entities between CDS (CE) & F&O.

·         Microsoft.Dynamics.Integrator.DualWriteFpRuntime.Plugins

·         Microsoft.Dynamics.Integrator.DualWriteRegistration.Plugins

·         Microsoft.Dynamics.Integrator.DualWriteRuntime.Plugins 

Microsoft Power Automate Service/platform Website

Microsoft Power Automate service/platform website is https://ms.flow.microsoft.com/  OR  https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/.

 

Power Automate is an online workflow service that automates actions across the most common apps and services.

 

NOTE : This is different than power apps make portal (https://make.powerapps.com/).

 

Follow below steps to login to Power Automate

1. Open Power Automate Service/platform website - https://ms.flow.microsoft.com

2.  Provide Microsoft Dynamics 365 admin user details

3. After successful login you can see below home dashboard page https;//india.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/ This home page URL would be different for each region/environment.

It shows below menus:

·         Action items, where you can manage approvals and business process flows.

·         My flows, where your flows reside

o    My flows

o    Team Flows

o    Business Process Flows

o    UI Flows

·         Create, where you start a new flow.

·         Templates, where you can take a look at some of the most popular templates. These should give you some great ideas for flows you want to try.

·         Connectors, where you can connect from one service to another.

·         Data, where you can access entities, connections, custom connectors and gateways.

·         Solutions, where you can manage your solutions.

·         Learn, where you can find information that will help you quickly ramp up on Power Automate.

How Dynamics 365 Power Apps Portal Page generated and displayed (rendered) in a browser?

 A picture is worth a thousand words!

 I captured below picture while going through learning videos from Microsoft learn site and luckily on the same day while discussing about the portal with my friend it helped me to show case the things I understood about the portals and how Dynamics 365 Power Apps Portal web page content actually gets generated and displayed or rendered in a client browser.

 

So thought to save it in my notes

 Dynamics 365 Power Apps Portal Page generated

Let us see how this page can be generated on the fly by Dynamics 365 Portals having  both static and dynamic content using Common Data Service data.

 

1. When a request is received, we know the Website.
   The Website has a "Header Template" and a "Footer Template".
   This is sufficient for the engine to generate the "Header".
   Then the Web Page is retrieved.

 

2. Web Page has a lot of properties describing all the different moving parts of the page.
   The most important one is the "Page Template".
   The "Page Template" is used to retrieve a template, in this case, a Web Template.
   The Web Template is parsed and the processing starts.
   It goes line by line and generates content as it goes.

 

3. The first one has a subtemplate "Breadcrumbs" which knows how to generate breadcrumbs using the hierarchical structure where the page is located in the hierarchy.
   The next one is "Page Header" which uses the "Title" from the "Content" on the Web Page.It generates the header or the title of the page.
   It then uses "Page Copy" which is HTML, and places this HTML on the page.

 

4. The next one is interesting because it includes dynamic data.
   It points to the "Entity List" that is defined on our Web Page.
   This "Entity List" contains the definition of which entity to go to and which view to use.
   In this instance, we use the "Active Contacts" view from our Contacts entity.
   It describes layout and it has the data.This information is sufficient to generate the list view on the page and render it.

 

5. Next, an "entity form" is used and it points to the "Entity Form" defined on the Web Page. This "Entity Form" is slightly different.
   It does not use Contacts, it uses Leads.

So, it takes this form from the Lead and generate the form on the Web Page.
And that is exactly what happens. The form with the "Submit" button is generated.

 

6. Finally, the Web Footer is extracted and generated and the page generation is complete.

Courtesy - Microsoft Learn !!

Uninstall/Delete Power Apps Portal completely from Dynamics 365

After installing 3 trial portals by using available templates  - Employee Self Service, Portal from blank and Community, I realized things are messed up. After browsing Community Portal unexpectedly it was showing "Employee Self Service" on home page, So I wanted to uninstall or delete Power Apps Portal completely from the environment and try by re-installing again.

 

Following things need to be considered about uninstalling/removing Power Apps Portal

• There is no uninstall option/button to remove the power apps portal
• Delete option for portal from  Power Apps maker portal
• Deleting the portal from the Power Apps maker portal only removes the portal web application and the portal app, it doesn't remove the portal metadata.
• You cannot provision a new portal if one exists or if it has been deleted; provisioning a new portal will use existing portal metadata.
• Resetting the portal from Administration site only reinstalls the portal web application.

 

To Uninstall/remove/delete Power Apps Portal completely

1. Delete the portal from the Power Apps maker Portal
2. Then delete the metadata from Common Data Service Environment using Power Management APP. Following entities store data for each portal which needs to be deleted. When you delete Website record associated with the Power Apps Portal related entity records gets deleted as well.
1. Websites
2. Web Pages
3. Content Snippets
4. Web link Sets
5. Site Settings
6. Site Makers
7. Page templates
8. Publishing States
9. Website Access Permissions
10. Web Roles
11. Web site languages
12. Entity Permissions
13. Entity Forms
14. Entity List
15. Web Forms
16. Content Moderation Policies
17. Add Content
18. Adds
19. Bindings
20. Blogs
21. Child websites
22. Forum Thread types
23. Forums
24. Idea Forum
25. Page Tags
26. Poll Placements
27. Poll
28. Tags
29. Web Files
30. Web Page Access Control Rules

How to check the Dynamics 365 Power Apps Portal Version

 While reading about the new preview feature of Power Apps Portal on Microsoft docs, it was mentioned that -

Your portal version must be 9.2.6.41 or later for this feature to work.

 

So I was trying to find the version of the portal installed on my trial environment. While looking for the portal version which is different than Solution, CRM Environment version, I was confused.

 

My friend Shaminder (who is a Portal Guru) shared easy trick, to use the Clear Cache service url  which shows the Portal version at the top of the Page

 

To check the Dynamics 365 Power Apps Portal Version

You have to open the portal URL by appending _services/about in another browser tab, which will show you Clear cache page

 

 

Example :

 

• Cache Service URL

https://portal4blank.powerappsportals.com/_services/about

 

•  Portal version - 9.2.5.15

  

 More details about the Service URL for clearing Cache you can find here -

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/admin/clear-server-side-cache

 

Dynamics 365 Power Apps  Edge Chromium Browser Add On - Alternate to Power Pane 

While working on Dynamics 365 CE entity records, some times we required to see the schema/logical names & labels of the fields shown on the form/page. If you are using Chrome browser then   Dynamics 365 Power Pane chrome extension helps to see the entity fields schema names/labels on entity forms/pages.

 

 

Today I was using Edge, instead of the chrome browser and I was badly missing the Power Pane to check the logical names of the Entity fields on the CRM record. So while searching Edge Add on/extensions I found  Metadata Browser for Dynamics 365/Power Apps add-on, which is not exactly similar to Power Pane, but it helps to see the logical names of the fields and browse the metadata independently.

Install it from here - https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/metadata-browser-for-dyna/fdfelmicclblfanogpnejdogjjildbkf?hl=en-GB

Or by searching Edge Add ons page.

          

 

 

• After installing this add-on you can see this new icon added in browser (near Favourite star icon)

 

 

• You have to click Update Setting by making sure "Show attribute logical names on the Entity Forms" checkbox is checked.

 

 

 

 

• After updating settings, just refersh the CRM page and it will show you logical names/schema names with field labels.

 

Simplified authentication and identity provider configuration - Power Apps Portal preview feature

While reading about the Dynamics 365 Power Apps Portals, I noticed new preview feature for Simplified Authentication and Identity Provide Configuration. You can add, configure and delete Identity Providers

like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft using it.

 

• To access this preview feature, you must use Power Apps preview (https://make.preview.powerapps.com/)

 

• Go to Apps-> Portal -> Settings ->  Authentication Settings

• More details  on Microsoft docs -  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/configure/use-simplified-authentication-configuration

Connecting Dynamics 365 CDS database using SQL & SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

Microsoft has released a long awaited preview feature to enable Tabular Data Stream (TDS) endpoint (a SQL data connection) for Common Data Service in an environment, which helps to use SQL and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to query CDS database/CRM organization database. 

Prerequisites To use this feature 

• Dynamics environments version should be 9.1.017437 or higher 
• SQL Sever Management Studio (SSMS) version should be 18.4 or higher
• System Administrator rights to manage environment features in Power Platform Admin center (admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com)

To query CDS entity data from the back end tables of database, follow below steps.

1. Enable TDS endpoint feature 

• Login to Power Platform Admin Center   https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/   
• Go to Environments > [select an environment] > Settings > Product > Features > Enable TDS endpoint.    
• Turn ON Enable TDS endpoint as shown below

         

           

2. SQL Server Management Studio - Connect to SQL Server

• Open SQL Sever Management Studio (version 18.4 or later)
• Click on connect to SQL Server
• Enter SQL Connection details and click Connect
• Server Name : Organization Name + ",5558"
• Authentication : Azure Active Directory - Password
• User Name: cds/crm system user id
• Password: user password

  

3. SQL Query & Explore data

• After connecting successfully you can see the database objects in Object Explorer
• You can open the New Query and query entity tables 😊

• 
  
  
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4. Important to Note 

• This feature only provides read only access to entity tables.
• Environment related tables may not have access to query.
• No ability to create new tables, views, procedure, constraints, indexes etc. yet due to security reasons.