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How to get all product backlog items from Azure DevOps with Power Automate
Normally you would think it should be quite easy to retrieve the product backlog items (PBIs) from Azure DevOps since it is all Microsoft and there are super nice connectors but it actually is not. To be fair there is the "List work items" action but you need to enter the Work Item IDs and when you just want to retrieve all PBIs without entering all the numbers this just does not make any sense. At first glance this action was the most helpful one of all the actions there are

Matthias Schmitz
Jan 132 min read
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How to hide related entities on a model driven app form
In a recent project I got the question how to hide related entity of an entity several times. So, here we go. New blog post. This is actually something that Microsoft made easier with the new UI of the model driven app editor. And you do not need any scripting whatsoever. You just go the form in which you want to hide the related entities. You click on Related and on the right side you can select Hide as seen in the screenshot on the right side: If you want to achieve the sam

Matthias Schmitz
Nov 25, 20251 min read
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How to find a Teams channel message with Power Automate
In a recent project I had the need to find a specific message in a Teams channel which was one of many replies to the initial channel message. I could not find an article about this online, so here we go! To demonstrate this, I chatted a little with myself and sent channel replies back and forth: In this example the Request number was sent as a channel message and we need this in a flow. And yes, I know, the example is not the best but it will be helpful nevertheless :) To ac

Matthias Schmitz
Aug 14, 20251 min read
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Dataflow not editable - Solved
Dataflows can be nice to transfer data from one system to the other but in the same time also very tricky. I want to cover two topics today: Edit dataflows in solutions Edit dataflows of other people Edit dataflows in solutions Have you ever tried editing a dataflow in a solution? If yes, you know what you mean. It will not work... I don't know why but you can only edit a dataflow in the Dataflows tab: Bug or feature? Speaking about bugs: Normally I work in English only. Some

Matthias Schmitz
May 19, 20252 min read
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How to draft an email message with Power Automate
I found an interesting bug (or feature) when you want to use the out of the box action of the Outlook connector. I will show it to you shortly and also explain how to overcome this bug. When you write normal text in the input field, you will get the html code in your email draft: This is really odd and not the expected behavior. However, if you click on the Code View button (</>) you will get the HTML view. If you now remove the HTML text completely and replace it with your t

Matthias Schmitz
Apr 28, 20251 min read
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How to update a row in an excel table with Graph API
In a recent project I wanted to update a row in excel and I had the feeling that the standard Excel online connector was kind of slow. That's why I tried to recreate this with the Graph API and it was more complex than expected. Prerequisites: Your excel workbook needs to have the data stored in a table formatted way. Otherwise it will be difficult to loop through the data Use the HTTP preauthorized request to call the Graph API Final HTTP Call What you need to do in the end

Matthias Schmitz
Apr 22, 20253 min read
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How to enable experimental features in the classic Power Automate designer and why
Today is the 8th of April and the new Power Automate designer is already some days old. It has a lot of nice features and one feature I like in particular: Select dynamic content when you write an expression in a flow step: This is something that is not possible in the old designer. Here you can either select dynamic content or write an expression: But is this really true? No, it is not! You can also use the dynamic content when you want to write an expression. For this you j

Matthias Schmitz
Apr 8, 20251 min read
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How to get the attachment of an attached email with Power Automate
To get the attachment that is attached to an attached email you can use the following Power Automate flow. Important to mention is that I wanted to demonstrate a basic version of this flow. It can be extended in various way. Covering .zip files, even more nested attachments and so on. I assume that you have a basic knowledge of Power Automate and will not describe all steps in detail. Let's start with the example of having two emails that were sent to our inbox: Email 1 with

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 24, 20252 min read
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How to connect Oracle with Dataverse by using Virtual Tables
Finally, it is here! You can connect your Dataverse environments with Oracle easily with the Virtual Tables capability. Virtual Tables allow you to connect directly with other data sources and let users interact directly with data. Previously, this was only possible for SharePoint, SQL and Salesforce. However, now it seems to be possible to connect to Oracle and let users interact with the data directly without using an API. To do this, you do the following: Click on "New tab

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 15, 20251 min read
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How to use a Canvas App as a redirect page
Have you ever stumbled in your projects about the need of a redirect page? No? I have. And I wanted to solve it with our beloved low code Power Platform. Here is how I did it: I made use of one simple function: Launch() (and also Blank() ). This function allows us to open web sites from our canvas apps. It opens them in a new tab. Now you need to close the old tab with the app to have a real redirect. The Exit() function does not help us here because it will move the user bac

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 15, 20252 min read
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How to get the logical name of Dataverse fields and the set name of Dataverse tables
For some occasions you need to use the logical names of Dataverse fields and the set name of Dataverse tables. For example, in Fetch XML Queries and OData filters , you need to use the logical name of the fields you want to filter on. You can always use other tools such as advanced find or the XRM toolbox, to generate your queries but from time to time you need to know the logical name of the field. Same goes for the tables. From time to time, you need the set name for examp

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 15, 20252 min read
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How to get one record using first() instead of using Apply to each in Power Automate
I would like to cover one of my best practices in today's blog post for working with Power Automate. You probably encountered during your work with Power Automate that for example the Dataverse List rows action will give you automatically an Apply to each loop action. Which is totally fine if you want to process several rows of data. However, there might also be the case that you are looking for one specific record and you don't have the GUID but you get the number or the nam

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 15, 20252 min read
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How to look for keywords in PDF documents with Power Automate
Have you ever wondered how you could check if a PDF document contains a specific string? Wonder no more! Let's dive into it directly. The use case is as following: Enter a key word, select a file and check if the file contains the keyword. Response shall be "true" if it does. This is a very simplified version but it was a POC I built for a colleague. It can later be extended to work with several files or several keywords. So, what do we need to do? We will use Power Automate

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 15, 20252 min read
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Problems with file size in Dataverse? No more!
When you start a new project you often need to think about file storage. A good option is the SharePoint integration Dataverse gives us. However, there might be occasions in which you want to use the file storage Dataverse gives us out of the box. Today, I want to show you two possibilities. Option 1 - Dataverse attachments First, when we create or edit a table we can check the checkbox that allows us to enable attachments. Now we can use the attachment column in our apps and

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 15, 20252 min read
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Use FetchXML queries to advance your Power Automate filtering
In my last article I wrote about how you can ease your life with OData filter in Power Automate. Today we are going to discover how we can use FetchXML queries to advance our filtering in Dataverse and to make it easier as well if it is getting more complex. What is FetchXML? Microsoft writes that "FetchXML is a proprietary XML based query language of Microsoft Dataverse used to query data using either the Web API or the Organization service". How can we use it? We can use i

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 15, 20254 min read
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How to ease your life with OData filter in Power Automate
Today we are covering Odata filter in Power Automate and how it will ease your life while developing flows in Power Automate. Microsoft says that "OData (Open Data Protocol) is an OASIS standard that establishes best practices for designing RESTful APIs". Furthermore they write that "One of the capabilities of OData is providing the ability to filter data using a standardized method across RESTful APIs, regardless if they are vendor provided or custom developed". (Source) Eno

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 15, 20253 min read
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How to get the option set label with Power Automate?
In many projects I have seen people stumble about this topic. Especially the ones that started to build their first apps with Dataverse as a datasource instead of using their previous SharePoint lists. Therefore, I would like to show you to today how you get the label of an option set and use it to write an e-mail as an example. First, we will have a look how we would handle this situation with SharePoint. Second, I am going to show you how you can achieve the same functional

Matthias Schmitz
Mar 10, 20253 min read
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