My thoughts on Dynamics 365, .NET, Azure, PowerShell, and other things too
My team recently encountered an error in Dynamics 365, and I thought it would be interesting to share the solution. Thanks to Microsoft support for providing an explanation.
We had created a custom security role with restricted privileges that could not create knowledge articles, and a user assigned to this security role would get an error trying to link a knowledge article to a case.
On approximately December 9th 2019 Microsoft stealth-released a new feature in version 9.1.0.5 of the Dynamics 365 configuration migration tool to filter exported records. This has undoubtedly been one of the most desired features for this tool by those who have used it to prepare complex data sets.
I suspect this tool has historically been named the “configuration” migration tool to emphasize the limited intended use of this tool to be used for “configuration” data and not complex data migration purposes. Those who ignored this limitation would live with the fact that all records for the selected entities would be exported, and then post-process the exported data to remove unwanted records.
Now that the filtering feature is here, it should streamline data export efforts. I’ve done some some early exploring to see how it works and what it can do and here is what I found.
The PowerApps Checker Powershell module introduces the ability to script the validation of solution files to analyze them for following best practices. This is an improvement over the Solution Checker which involves submitting solutions for validation through a web interface. One significant difference between the two tools is the Solution Checker makes the output available for download as Excel files whereas the PowerApps Checker outputs SARIF files.
SARIF files use the JSON file format and are meant to be consumed by other applications to display the information a human readable format. The SARIF website shows three existing tools that have been built for viewing these files, unfortunately they’re not conducive to being used in a team-based environment where the information needs to be shared, like Excel files can be.
One way to quickly convert these SARIF files to Excel is with Excel’s Power Query and its support for JSON files. After using the Power Query editor to create the query, it’s then possible to access the query in its raw text-based format so that it can be edited, or shared with others.
When working with Dynamics 365 Portals, there is sometimes the need to run multiple portals of the same type out of the same organization (e.g. multiple community portals). This can be a challenge to setup because the provisioning process in the Dynamics 365 portal add-on only allows the data for a given portal to be imported once.
The Adoxio.Dynamics.DevOps PowerShell module contains a little known function which helps to work around this limitation by facilitating the modification of a Configuration Migration Tool data file so that it can be imported into an organization while avoiding conflicting with any existing data already in the organization.
The Adoxio.Dynamics.DevOps module includes several features that assist in the data management of Dynamics 365 projects. The features during export are the execution of schema file transformation rules, and unpacking exported data sets so that each record is stored in a single XML file. This blog post will cover the schema file transformation feature.
The previous post looked at the mechanics of adding Adoxio.Dynamics.DevOps scripts to a project. This blog post examines the solution export process.