Tag: powerappportals

PL-400: Microsoft Power Platform Developer Exam

I’ve been continuing with taking new exams as they come out. Having recently taken the MB-400 exam (see MB-400 Power Apps & Dynamics 365 Developer Exam), I was slightly surprised to see the announcement that it was going to be replaced!

Admittedly, I was also surprised (in a good way) that I passed the MB-400, not being a developer! It’s been quite amusing to tell people that I’m a certified Microsoft Dynamics Developer. It definitely puts a certain look on their faces, which always cracks me up.

Then again, the general approach seems to be to move all of the ‘traditional’ Dynamics 365 exams to the new Power Platform (PL) format. This includes obviously re-doing the exams to be more Power Platform centric, covering the different parts of the platform than just the ‘first party apps’. It’s going to be interesting to see how this landscape extends & matures over time.

The learning path came out in the summer, and is located at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/pl-400. It’s actually quite good. There’s quite a lot that overlaps with the MB-400 exam material, as well as the information that’s recently been covered by Julian Sharp & Joe Griffin.

The official description of the exam is:

Candidates for this exam design, develop, secure, and troubleshoot Power Platform solutions. Candidates implement components of a solution, including application enhancements, custom user experience, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and custom visualizations.

Candidates must have strong applied knowledge of Power Platform services, including in-depth understanding of capabilities, boundaries, and constraints. Candidates should have a basic understanding of DevOps practices for Power Platform.

Candidates should have development experience that includes Power Platform services, JavaScript, JSON, TypeScript, C#, HTML, .NET, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, RESTful web services, ASP.NET, and Microsoft Power BI.

So the PL-400 was announced on the Wednesday of Ignite this year (at least in my timezone). Waking up to hear of the announcement, I went right ahead to book it! Unfortunately, there seemed to be some issues with the Pearson Vue booking system. It took around 12 hours to be sorted out, & I then managed to get it booked Wednesday evening, to take it Thursday.

So, as before, it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else!). It’s also in beta at the moment, which means that things can obviously change.

There were a few glitches during the actual exam. One or two questions with answers that didn’t make sense (eg line 30 does X, but the code sample finished at line 18), and question numbers that seemed to jump back & forth (first time it’s happened to me). I guess that I’ve gotten used to at least ONE glitch happening somewhere, so this was par for the course.

I’ve tried to group things as best together as I feel (in my recollection), to make it easier to revise.

  • Model Apps.
    • Charts. How they work, what drives them, what they need in order to actually work, configuring them
    • Visualisation components for forms. What they are, examples of them, what each one does, when to use each one
    • Custom ribbon buttons. What these are, different tools able to be used to create/set them up, troubleshooting them
    • Entity alternate keys. What these are, when they should be used, how to set them up & configure them
    • Business Process Flows. What these are, how they can be used across different scenarios, limitations of them
    • Business Rules. What these are, how they can be used across different scenarios, limitations of them
  • Canvas apps
    • Different code types, expressions, how to use them & when to use them
    • Network connectivity, & how to handle this correctly within the app for data capture (this was an interesting one, which I’ve actually been looking at for a client project!)
    • Power Apps solution checker. How to run it, how to handle issues identified in it
  • Power Automates
    • Connectors – what these are, how to use them, security around them, querying/returning results in the correct way
    • Triggers. What is a trigger, how do they work, when to use/not use them
    • Actions. What these are, how they can be used, examples of them
    • Conditions. What these are, how to use them, types of conditions/expressions/data
    • Timeouts. How to use them, when to use them, how to configure
  • Power Virtual Agents. How to set them up, how to configure them, how to deploy them, how to connect them to other systems
  • Power App Portals. Different types, how to set them up, how to configure them, how they can work with underlying data & users
  • Solutions
    • Managed, unmanaged, differences between them, how to use each one.
    • Deploying solutions. Different methods that can be used to do it, best practise for each, when to use each one
    • Package Deployer & how to use it correctly
  • Security.
    • All of the different security types within Dynamics 365/Power Platform. Roles/Teams/Environment/Field level. How to set up, configure, use in the right way.
    • Hierarchy security
    • Wider platform security. How to use Azure Active Directory for authentication methods, what to know around this, how to set it up correctly to interact with CDS/Dynamics 365
    • What authentication methods are allowed, when/how they can be used, how to configure them
  • ‘Development type stuff’
    • API’s. The different API’s that can be used, methods that are valid with each one, the Organisation service
    • Discovery URL’s. What these are, which ones are able to be used, how they’d be used/queried
    • Plugins. How to set up, how to register, how to deploy. Steps needed for each
    • Plugin debugging/troubleshooting. Synchronous vs asynchronous
    • Component types. Actions/conditions/expressions/data operations. What these are, when each is used
    • Custom ribbon buttons. What these are, different tools able to be used to create/set them up, troubleshooting them
    • Javascript web resources. How to use these correctly, how to set them up on entities/forms/fields
    • Powerapps Component Framework (PCF). What these are, how to develop them, how to use them in the right way
  • System Design
    • Entity relationship types. What they are, what each one does, how they work, when to use them appropriately. Tools that can be used to display them for system design purposes
    • Storage considerations across different types, including CDS & Azure options
  • Azure items
    • Azure Consumption API. How to monitor, how to handle, how to change/update
    • Azure Event Grid. What it is, the different ways in which it can be used, when each source should be used
  • Dynamics 365 for Finance. Native functionality included in it

The biggest surprise that I had really when thinking back to things was the inclusion of Dynamics 365 for Finance in it. Generally the world is split into ‘front of house’ (being Dynamics 365/Power Platform), and ‘back of house’ (Dynamics 365 for Finance & Supply Chain Management). The two don’t really overlap, though they’re supposed to be coming more together over time. Being that this is going to happen, I guess it’s only natural that exam questions around each other will come up!

Overall it was quite a good exam. Some of the more ‘code-style’ questions were somewhat out of my comfort zone, and I’ll freely admit to guessing some of the answers around them! Time will tell, as they say, to see how I’ve done in it.

I hope that this is helpful for anyone who’s thinking of taking it – good luck, and please do drop a comment below to let me know how you found it!

–

Workflows & Managed Solutions

This is about some interesting behaviour around workflows & managed solutions, which I’ve recently discovered. Let me give a bit of background first.

Currently I’m working on several COVID-19 apps for local authorities, to be able to help them assist people in need. As part of this, each local authority has a portal within the solution. The portal itself is a Power App Portal, and I haven’t really had exposure to them before.

blog.atwork.at | Hello, PowerApps Portals (and external users)!
Default portal view, not the one we implemented!

Installing a Power Apps Portal comes with quite a large number of solutions in order to get it to work. More on this below.

Due to the way in which we’re engaging with our clients, the solutions are built in a single tenancy (different environments, of course!). We’re then inviting the users in as guests through Azure Active Directory, to be able to access functionality etc. This works well – we don’t need to worry about managing user accounts, AAD permissions, etc. However it also means that we don’t have any Office 365 licenses within the environment itself.

Now we have workflows that are sending emails out around the portal – registrations, password resets, etc. These are being generated automatically by the system, but as there’s no Office 365 mailbox for the user, they’re queuing up.

It’s not possible to authenticate a mailbox belonging to an external user (we tried!), as the system needs a native (full) user with an active mailbox to be able to send out emails. This is of course unlike Power Automate, where you can create a Send Email action and use specified credentials for logging in to send an email.

So, we did what any normal system administrator/configurator would do. We opened up the relevant (managed) solution, and from there opened up the workflow that we needed to modify. Things looked normal at first – we deactivated the workflow, and started poking around it to see what made it tick.

We came across the part that actually took user credentials to send the email that was being generated, and modified this accordingly. Then we saved the workflow, which was successful. However, upon trying to then reactivate the workflow, we got the following error message (helpful, isn’t it!):

Nicely it gives the option to download the log file around the error. This can usually be quite helpful (at times), so we thought we’d take a look at it. Behold the following (I’ve had to shrink the screenshot to allow it to fit on the screen!):

Isn’t that ‘beautiful’. Don’t worry if you can’t actually make out the error information – none of it makes any sense, at least not in a practical sort of way.

Being stuck at this, I thought to reach out to one of the community Power App Portal champions, Mario Trueba. I’ve known him for a while, and he’s just simply amazing. Having asked if I could jump on a call with him for 15 minutes to diagnose (& hopefully find an answer!), we spent almost an hour!

He suggested trying to use the classic interface, as I had been doing all of this through the new UI. So off I went to open up Classic (I’ve missed this, I will freely admit). Through there, we opened up the solution, opened up the workflow, and re-activated it. Or not, as it happens – even through the Classic UI, we weren’t able to do so. We tried a variety of things, but to no avail. It just simply wasn’t happening!

I was slightly concerned that there was an underlying issues with Portals, perhaps from some legacy CafeX code. I had tried searching with Mario for error details contained within the log file, but we couldn’t find anything that would fix it.

The next morning on waking up & checking Twitter, I noticed someone tweeting around Portals, and engaged with them. They turned out to be on the Portals development team, and told me to shoot them over an email with the details, which I did. They then replied to me, saying that it wasn’t anything specific to Portals, and that I should raise a support ticket. That crossed one item off my list (a Portals issue), but I was still needing to get things resolved.

So I went off & raised a support ticket. A few hours later, a very nice tech support person called Siva gave me a call to discuss the issue. We hopped into Teams, and in what I can only describe as the SHORTEST period of time that I’ve ever experienced, the issue was resolved (it took 7 minutes in total. Yes, I know…). Don’t worry – I’m not going to leave you hanging here!

See, what the ‘issue’ (and I’m deliberately putting it in quotes) was turned out to be something quite simple, yet quite strange.

Essentially opening the workflow from the managed solution somehow (& I don’t know HOW) inherits the ‘managed’ property. This is whether we open it from the new UI, or the classic UI. As a result we’re able to deactivate it, but we CAN’T reactivate it due to the system thinking that we’re modifying a managed component (as an aside, it is interesting how I did manage to save it though?). This was what was causing things to fall over, and the error message was really not helpful at all.

It’s also not a matter of being a Microsoft (or ISV) managed solution. I’ve replicated this happening with a solution that I’ve built, exported as managed, & then imported.

So how did we do it? Well, there are two ways in which this can be dealt with:

Either we can go to System/Processes, find the workflow there, open it up, and then reactivate it:

Or we can open up the Default solution, navigate to processes, select the workflow, and then reactivate it:

Both methods work just fine, and as mentioned earlier on, I’ve since replicated this on workflows in other managed solutions.

To me, this is somewhat strange, and should work regardless. According to Siva, it’s the desired system behaviour, though I have no idea why someone should want it to work in one way, and not in another.

So if you’re reading this, and you might just happen to know someone in the necessary Microsoft engineering/development team who’d be able to answer this, could you point them my way? I’d love to engage them to find out why, how, and if they could pretty please change this?