Tag: THEPCFGUY

Do You Want to Prove Your Productivity While Working from Home?

How productive are you?

When we work from home, we have enough flexibility to do our job but, are we productive enough? The luxury can turn into a missed opportunity if not done precisely.

It’s been almost two months since I wrote a blog or participated in some community activities. I was too busy with my work and passive learning. I was under the impression that I am doing great because, I am delivering more tasks, learning new things, and extending my working hours by staying awake at night. I was being extremely productive. Right?

NO, I was just killing my productivity. HOW? It’s not all about delivering more tasks, but also about completing them in budgeted time without compromising on quality.

When I looked into my work, the activity which I used to complete in an hour from office is now taking more than an hour. Initially, I thought it could be the frequent breaks, however, I gradually realized, it was not just the breaks, it was simply because my productivity was going down the scale.

Oh no!!

This is not always noticeable mainly due to relaxed timelines during the current situation, as well as increased family time and close to zero daily commute. Do not let this comfort zone control your productivity, instead, put efforts to learn new things or educate yourself during the extra hours you earned by working from home. I bet this is the right time to sharpen your actual time management skills.

Shh!!

So what it takes to improve productivity while working from home? Though I am not an expert but can surely share my experience as of what helped me…take a look:

  • Be accountable for your timelines as more open-ended schedule may lead to bad results.
  • Set up a workspace and stick to your work hours.
  • Create a to-do-list and try to stick to it.
  • Take breaks and minimize distractions to put your best effort.
  • Avoid late-night work as socializing and exercising is also important.
  • Track your working hours to understand when you are more productive.
  • Start maintaining work-life balance to make sure you are doing great in both departments.

So now, over to you! let me know if they helped…

Aggregate Grid PCF

When you have to see the Sum, Count, AVG of numeric columns in a subgrid, what is the easiest way? Export to Excel right? Now, there is an easier way: Aggregate Grid PCF Control. View Aggregates directly from Subgrid. This PCF control will list all numeric and currency columns in the view at the footer area, you just have to select the required column. This is not a production-ready control(I wanted to give life to an idea that came in during COVID19 lockdown) you can get the source code and unmanaged solution from here.

CSS & Grid design is from hovering list By Danish Naglekar.

Let’s Learn PCF Together

After adding Aggregate Grid Control to PCF gallery, I received many LinkedIn messages saying they love to build PCFs but they cannot as they are not pro UI developers. Trust me, I am not a pro UI developer just know the basics only :(, with the help of Awsome Microsoftcommunity, I managed to build a couple of PCF controls and for the last 6 months, every month am adding a new control to the PCF gallery. So now I have started a short video series of PCF control tutorial for beginners. these are 5 mins videos released once in every 3 days covering only one point per video. Hope this will be helpful for beginners. This is my first YouTube video series so am sure there is a huge scope for improvement 😅

Toggle Next PCF Control

Community plays an important role in everyday work life, at-least fifty percentage of my D365 and power-platform knowledge is gained from community(Blogs, Videos, Forums Etc..), that is why I love being part of awesome MS community.

Recently one of my clients said he doesn’t want to use the next button in the business process flow but something similar in the form is required. I do not agree such requests but since they are not really using the business process flow, the request looked relevant. I had to show him a POC on the same day itself. This is were the community comes to help. I logged in to PCF Gallery and searched for something similar, within few seconds found this PCF mask with Fabric-UI Icons for two-option field by David Rivard.

Boom!! Cloned the git repo and POC is ready in an hour.

Added a client side script to change tab when the field value is toggled.

This is not a production ready control, its just a copy I made from a cloned Git repo.

You can get the source code from https://github.com/nijos/ToggleNext.

Hope this helps. Happy Power Building.

Smart Grid PCF

One of my customer complained during a UAT session that, it’s too difficult for her to add new record using + button in a sub-grid, as it takes her to a new record window and she has to perform too many navigation. She was happy, when I enabled the quick create forms.

But, I was not happy and I wondered why OOB editable grid is not supporting this. I thought to give it a try using PCF controls, and this is the result.

Initially, it was not easy as we need to query the metadata to get field type for each column in the view. Following are the steps to configure smartgrid.

  1. Get the solution from here
  2. Import solution
  3. Add control to sub-grid
  4. Give required parameters.
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  • Primary Lookup: Logical name of the lookup field for the relationship. for example contact sub-grid in the account is “*parentcustomerid_account”.
  • Primary Entity Set: Entity set name of the current entity where the sub-grid is added

This is to set the related lookup using Web API, you can use Rest Builder to get these parameter values correctly, for example if contact sub-grid in account form is using parent customer relationship, to set the account lookup in contact following code is used var entity = {}; entity[“parentcustomerid_account@odata.bind“] = “/accounts(xxxxx-xxxx-xxxx)”;

Known bugs.

  • Does not support N:N
  • Validation for empty rows.
  • Does not support composite fields(customer lookup).
  • Poor CSS 🙂

Planned enhancements

  • Inline editing.
  • Validation for mandatory fields

This is not a perfect replacement for Quick create form, but you are always welcome to enhance and add features to Smart Grid Github Repo here.

Activity Summary Pro

So busy with year ending and 2020 plans. AsvI promised “The pro version will be released in two months”, I have to release the pro version today. Really sorry for the poor CSS, am actually bad at styling stuffs 😦 . But you can always improve the style and features in the Github, any updates are appreciated. Here is the github repo link.

New features added.

  • Click on Activity Name to Expand the list.
  • View activities as a chart
  1. Get the unmanaged solution file  Here
  2. Import the solution to your organization.
  3. Create a view with the required filters. If you do not require the control to consider certain activity types, you can exclude them in your view filter. The control will consider only the records returned by the view selected.
  4. Add sub-grid to the form with the created view.
  5. Add Activity Summary control to the sub-grid.
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Note: If you need to exclude certain activity types, apply the same logic in the view filter.

Special mentions

Hari Narayanan Kumar for his Activity Analyzer which helped me to include the chart easily.

Andrew Butenko for his quick repleys and answers in the power users community 🙂

Happy New Year, let this be the year of Power Users

Activity Summary PCF for Model Driven Apps

It’s been a while since PCF controls were released for general availability. I was busy with my project schedules and finally, I managed to try out one. The Activity Summary grid. We can have activity timelines or sub-grids to view the activities under a record but these do not provide a high-level glance on activities. So I created one PCF to show activity summary, count of each type of activity under a record. This comes with Zero configuration. Whattt?? Yes, Zero configuration.

Follow the steps below to set yours.

  1. Download the managed solution from here.
  2. Import the solution to your organization.
  3. Create a view with the required filters. If you do not require the control to consider certain activity types, you can exclude them in your view filter. The control will consider only the records returned by the view selected.
  4. Add sub-grid to the form with the view we created.
  5. Add Activity Summary control to the sub-grid.

Boom! Done.

Wait is there an advanced version? Yes I will be releasing Activity Summary Pro in next 2 months :).