After working with PCF during the initial private preview, I haven’t had a chance to use it in anger. Until today. And it didn’t go smoothly.
It started well. I installed the CLI tooling, got a new template control ready to go with pac pcf init and connected to CDS with pac auth create. Next I tried to publish the control with pac pcf push when it failed.
The build log indicated a 401 Unauthorized error with an internal NuGet feed.
I’m pleased to release SQL 4 CDS 2.2.0 with two main improvements:
Continue reading “SQL 4 CDS 2.2.0 released”I was very pleased today to see a new feature in FetchXML – column comparisons!
This allows us to build queries that compares the values in one column against those in another. Previously we’ve only been able to compare a column against a constant value.
Continue reading “Column Comparisons in FetchXML”I’m very pleased to release D365 Posts Bot today!
This is the finished article from my earlier series of blog posts on creating a bot to link posts from D365 through to Teams and back again.
Continue reading “D365 Posts Bot Released!”Now we’ve got our bot sending out notifications, we want to be able to handle a reply from the user and add it back into D365 as a new post.
The adaptive card notification lets the user reply via an embedded form. This makes it nice and neat. When the user fills in this form and clicks Reply, three bits of information are sent back to the bot:
Continue reading “Creating a bot pt. 8 – Handling Replies”Occasionally we might have an entity with multiple “types” of some sort, and each type needs a different form to show the details.
Luckily we have the formSelector API to do this. Taking a simple example where the name of the form to show is stored directly in an attribute you can use a script like this to automatically switch the form as the record is opened or when the attribute is changed:
Now I’ve got my bot sending notifications to Teams, but the display of the messages left something to be desired. This is where Adaptive Cards comes in.
Continue reading “Creating a bot pt. 7 – Adaptive Cards”Now we’ve got a notification when a new post is added, we need to figure out who to notify about it. This is the process I’ve come up with:
Continue reading “Creating a bot pt. 6 – Posts to Users”Now we’ve got the infrastructure sorted for the bot talking to Teams and getting it installed for users, we need to start letting it know when something interesting happens in D365 so the bot can send messages out to users. Enter the WebHook.
Continue reading “Creating a bot pt. 5 – Getting notifications from D365”Last time I proved I could send a proactive message to myself, but I needed my user ID that I could only get after I’d started a conversation with the bot. For my real-life scenario I need to be able to push notifications to users that haven’t interacted with my bot before.
Continue reading “Creating a bot pt. 3 – Adding Users”