Apple macOS and Document Templates (Excel & Word)

Part 6 of the series about the new Mac Mini M4 and Power Platform, this time I will check the built-in template functionality available in model-driven apps.This functionality allows to upload a template (Excel or Word) and users can download a document with data coming from the app.An important thing to remember is that Excel templates are applied to views and Word templates are applied to a single record.Let's start with Excel templates: the documentation...

Apple macOS and Dataverse Plugins

We've probably come to the topic that sooner or later every developer working with the old .NET Framework wonders: does it work on Mac?As we saw in the previous posts the recent .NET versions are cross-platform and they work on Mac (like the one I have that is ARM based) but older .NET Framework versions (4.x) are meant to run on Windows.Dataverse Plugins still require .NET Framework 4.6.2 (as stated in the tutorial), so what are our options?Let's...

Apple macOS and the TDS endpoint

Part 4 about Mac Mini M4 and Power Platform, this time is about SQL and Dataverse.Dataverse offers a way to access its data using SQL statements (read-only) by enabling the TDS endpoint.The documentation shows how to use it with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) but this application is only for Windows.The main reason I use the TDS endpoint is to run some queries (like a count or strange joins) and they are usually faster using SQL. For XrmToolBox...

Apple macOS and Console Applications with Dataverse

Third episode with the Mac Mini M4, let's try to connect to Dataverse using a console application.I like very much Visual Studio for Windows but the Mac version has been discontinued, details here: What happened to Visual Studio for Mac?The alternative is Visual Studio Code (we used it for PCF development on the previous post) with the extension C# Dev Kit.When you create a new project using this extension you get two default settings:top level...

Apple macOS and PCF Development

Second part about my journey with the new Mac Mini M4 (first post here) and surprise surprise is about PCF development!I usually don't code PCF components because most of the time I can find the one I need inside PCF Gallery, there are more than 550 components listed there, so big kudos to all the authors.PCF development usually brings people not familiar with Power Apps/Power Platform inside the ecosystem, when a new control is published inside...

Apple macOS and Power Platform - Introduction

After watching numerous YouTube videos about the new Mac Mini M4 I decided to buy it, here a photo beside my mouse:It's not my first Apple computer, I have a MacBook Air 2012 that I still use these days for browsing and of course I am a bit locked inside the ecosystem with my iPhone.The majority (if not all) of the videos and articles about the new Mac Mini M4 is about editing videos, games and general productivity. All the reviews are ok but I wanted...

a Canvas app for bus tickets? Possible!

A month ago I attended Scottish Summit 2024 in Aberdeen, because was a new place for me I decided to visit the city and I used the public transportation.I downloaded the "Stagecoach" app and I bought a ticket, it appeared like this screenshot:When I launched the app I was surprised, in addition to the QR Code in the top there is also a centered colored bar, switching between the time and a random word.The colored bar also tilts based on the accelerometer...

new project: Hōjin Bangō Custom APIs (Japanese Corporate Number)

I was recently in Japan (not my first time there) and each time I try to learn a bit about the culture.One of my recent encounters is the Corporate Number called in Japan hōjin bangō (法人番号), in a certain way the equivalent of a VAT Number to identify a company.My next thought was: I am sure there is a service to check the validity of these corporate numbers.There is indeed a web site by the National Tax Agency in English and Japanese and...

Rich Text to Plain Text conversion inside Power Apps

Sometimes we need to get only the text from an HTML document, like the Rich Text format available for the text type inside Dataverse/Model-driven app.If you need to perform this action client-side, a simple JavaScript function can be used: function parseHTML(html) { let doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(html, 'text/html'); return doc.body.textContent || ""; } function test_richtext_OnChange(executionContext) { var formContext = executionContext.getFormContext(); let...

Power Fx and what I mean for low-code

Power Fx is one of the programming languages available inside Power Platform, the Microsoft documentation reports:Power Fx is the low-code language that will be used across Microsoft Power Platform.It's mostly used inside Canvas Apps but inside a canvas app it's very difficult for me to call it "low-code", if there is a function called "Explain This Formula" inside Copilot (link) it usually means it's hard to read or people tend to write complicated...

My idea to give something to the community: the CCA License!

If you follow tech news you may have read something about "xz Utils" (you can find an article about it here).I don't have a solution to this kind of problems and my support goes to Lasse Collin, the creator and my maintainer of xz Utils.How an Open Source software is licensed plays an important role and made me think:what can I add to the MIT License (the license I normally use) something to recognize the community around what I am releasing?This is the idea behind the CCA License (link: https://github.com/GuidoPreite/CCA-License)CCA...

new project: QR Code Custom APIs

As I wrote in my previous post, in the recent months I created several Custom APIs and some of them are available inside my GitHub account.The latest one is QR Code Custom APIsRight now there is a single Custom API called GenerateQRCodeUrlAs input accepts a Url (string) and it returns the Base64 representation (string) of a PNG file, this can be used for example inside HTML content (setting the src property like data:image/png;base64,...

Impersonate Dataverse Users connected to Entra ID Groups

When a Security Group is assigned to a Dataverse Environment users need to be part of the selected Microsoft Entra ID Group (directly as members or if they are inside a group that is member of the main group) otherwise they cannot be added.This facilitates the work of the IT department to manage who can access or not a specific environment, also a specific Team inside Dataverse can be created to map the Microsoft Entra ID Group:Keep in mind that...

Custom APIs for Power Automate: why they should be developed

Power Automate is an important piece of the Power Platform, no doubts about this.Can it be improved? Sure.Low-Code and Pro-Code are two buzz words constantly being around Power Platform, which side you prefer it's not my business, as I often says there are different ways to implement a process, it's also the beauty of programming (traditional or visual).One thing I do not like is to create convoluted processes to achieve something that is very easy using another tool, we always need to tend to simplification in my opinion, considering the...