Recently we have been playing with Child Flows in Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) as part of a solution with Dynamics 365 however when we selected the child flow to be executed we received the error
"The workflow with id '9017e2ce-1501-ea11-a811-000d3a6aaf7c', name PowerApp -> Update a record cannot be used as a child workflow because child workflows only support embedded connections."

This stumped us a bit. We tried to specify the environment as (current) or the specific environment with no luck.

After a fair amount of pulling our hair out, my colleague Lachlan worked out that the issue was caused by the type of CDS connector selected.

It turns out that when you create a flow from within a Solution there are now two different Common Data Service Actions and if you don't type in the search to filter you can't see both connectors.

Be careful to select the "Common Data Servce (current environment)" within your child flow to make it compatible.

Below you can see the differences with between the Standard CDS Action and the Current Environment CDS Action.

This is extremely deceptive and hopefully Microsoft will come up with a better solution as I can see this tripping up a lot of people.

This is more for me to keep track of ways to work with Logic Apps & Flow. I will be updating this as I go.

Dates

Daniel over at o365Dude.com has some good information on basic date operations.

Converting Dates from UTC

convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'AUS Eastern Standard Time','yyyy-MM-dd')

Getting the Days between 2 dates

I found this in the answer from leyburn19 on the Power Users forum
div(sub(ticks(convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'AUS Eastern Standard Time', 'yyyy-MM-dd')),ticks(convertFromUtc(variables('FromDate'),'AUS Eastern Standard Time', 'yyyy-MM-dd'))),864000000000)

Adding Days to Dates

addDays(utcNow(),1,'yyyy-MM-dd')

Get the Day of The Week

dayOfWeek(convertFromUtc(utcNow(),'AUS Eastern Standard Time', 'yyyy-MM-dd'))

This won't be a comprehensive list, it is more about what I use day to day. That said I am keen to hear if there are any that I have missed that I should be using.

1. First things first, XrmToolbox. It is a non start without this amazing suite of tools. This was built by Tanguy Touzard and has an established communitity behind it developing an array of plugins.

Download: https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/

Once you have it downloaded and extracted I would recommend as a minimum the following plugins.

• Early Bound Generator
• FetchXML Builder
• Metadata Document Generator
• Plugin Registration
• Plugin Trace Viewer
• Ribbon Workbench 2016
• View Layout Replicator
• Webresources Manager

There are pleanty more and it should be your first point of call when trying to do something. Chances are if you need to do it someone else has had to as well.

2. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE Tools, are available for download via NuGet. This includes tools that used to be in the SDK.

• Code Gneration
• Configuration Migraiton
• Package Deployer
• Plug-in Registration
• Solution Packager

Microsoft have a powershell script you can use to download and extract the tools.

Download: https://docs.microsoft.com

3. Level up for Dynamics CRM/365, is an extension for Chrome to do some awesome in browser. Some of the big ones for me are

• Logical Names |
• God Mode
• Record Properties
• Record URL
• Record ID
• Show Optionset Values

There are a heap more it can do which you can check out at https://github.com/rajyraman/Levelup-for-Dynamics-CRM

Download: Chrome Web Store

4. D365 Developer Extensions, is an extention for Visual Studio 2015 / 2017 and it allows to download, develop and deploy web resources from within Visual Studio as well as 1 click deploy of plug-ins as well as some templates.

Download: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/

5. CRM REST Builder, is another awesome tool for the belt from Jason Lattimer. It is a solution you can import into Dynamics 365 which allows you to build the JavaScript web requests using either the 2011 or Wab API endpoints.

This solution will save your hair and make you not completely hate the client side Web Api and all it's qwerks.

For more information check out Jason Lattimers Github https://github.com/jlattimer/CRMRESTBuilder

Download: https://github.com/jlattimer/CRMRESTBuilder/releases

As I said, if there are any that i have missed let me know. I will continue to update this as I find others.

Cheers,
Brent

While researching the Chrome Quick Create Bug I came across a post to enable "Legacy Form Rendering" that it would work however it causes other issues.

This morning while reading through some other articles it kept coming up. This spurred me to actually try it and lo and behold it works however depending on the rest of your platform as above it could cause other issues so use with caution.

To enable Legacy Form Rendering go to Settings > Administration

Then select System Settings

The scroll down the General tab until you find "Use legacy form rendering"

Set it to yes, click ok and refresh.

I have tested this in V8.2 and V9.0 and it works.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Brent

An issue got raised to me that the Quick Create forms we not working intermittenly.

I took a quick look around I found the the quick create forms would work the first time they were used but then failed to load for every use after that.

After searching around for others I came across one post in the dynamics community forum https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/t/272462/ however the only fix was to modify a CSS value which isn't going to work for Online and is always something to avoid even for on premise environments.

I have tested this on V8.1 through to V9.0 with all versions being effected.

This is due to the IFrame which loads the form gets it’s height updated to 0px in chrome for some reason.

Should be

and is

I have 2 approaches to workaround this issue until a proper fix is released however neither of them would be a supported change.

Both solutions use the same JavaScript to modify the DOM and set the height of the iFrame.
The first solution is to create a web resource, where the second is to use a bookmarklet.

Web Resource

Create a JavaScript Web Resource and add it to the OnLoad of each Quick Create form that you use.
This the easiest solution to roll out to users.

I created a solution with only the above web resource and the quick create forms I wanted to fix.

in each of the quick create forms I added the Web Resource to the form properties and called the quick fix function

Publish the changes and you are done.

Bookmarklet

I had some feedback from a customer that didn't want to deploy any additional web resources into their already complicated environment, especially one with unsupported changes.

So to address this I have used esentially the same JavaScript as before except instead of it being in a web resource it works out of the bookmarks and requires user intervention.

To do this add the Bookmark Bar to the browser, right click the bookmarks bar and click "Add page..."

Enter the name of the bookmark, in my case I used "Fix Quick Create" and paste the above javascript into the URL and click save.

Now when you open a quick create form that doesn't open correctly

click the "Fix Quick Create" bookmark and done.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Brent