Clarification about the use of Power Apps Portal

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Posted on by l.oliver

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Hi,

I'm working with dynamics 365 CE and building a solution around an entity named, "Property Unit" (like apartments). Now I'm looking into using a Portal, for advertising these "Property Units" when new tenant/buyers are needed.

So I have created a Self-Service Portal and followed this guide to create a custom entity list. It's all working and no problem with the guide. But I would really love to customize it a lot more. This is what it looks like at the moment: https://yavica-self-service.powerappsportals.com/custom-list/

For example, I want the entity list to look more like a "product collection" (a grid view) with images. You can see this site as an example.

I have also looked into liquid and got some things working with some basic html grids with using the entity list feature. That's all fine but really needs some styling css/bootstrap. Is it even possible to use bootstrap with Portals?

I feel like I'm trying to look in every direction and kinda need some guidance or recommendation on how much it makes sense to use Power Apps Portal in my situation - showing my "Property Units"-records on a page with customized UI.

Would it be better to actually build the website elsewhere and then create some integration to make the data I need from the website to be stored in my dynamics CE solution?

I hope my question makes sense, else please let me know. Then I'll try to elaborate.

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Power Apps portals

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Christian Leverenz 1,214 on at

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Hi @oml ,
it is definetly possible to do everything of the requested things with portals. You have to dive in the worls of liquid for that kind of things.
There is an example of an individual rendering of an entityview available: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/liquid/render-rss-custom-page-template . This creates a rss feed but you will get the story.
Another approach could be to use a fetch and render the result of the fetch like you want it (we do this kind of rendering regularly) - documentation can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/liquid/template-tags .
Bootstrap (3) is in fact standard in portals and available out of the box. You can of course overwrite everything and use no standards and only use liquid for everythiung. But i would not recommend that approach as there is a lot of functionality like navigation, headers, footers and so on already available.
Additional css can be attached as a webfile and is (in stdsetup) automatically added to your pages without any hassle.

Hope this helps a little bit,
Christian

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l.oliver 147 on at

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Thanks for your reply, @chleverenz! That was very helpful.

I have a quick question about getting a specific entity record by an id. I don't know if I need to make a new question on the forums or you know this? 🙂

Well, here it goes:

I have followed this example ("retrieve a single record"). Here is what my code looks like:

{% assign unit = entities['crc17_propertyunit'][request.params.id] %} <div>id from request.params.id: {{ request.params.id }}</div> <div>Unit id: {{ unit.id }}</div> <div>Unit name: {{ unit.name }}</div> {% if unit %} <div>test - unit is true</div> {% endif %} {% endblock %}

I can retrieve the unit.id - that's the same as the request.params.id, obviously.. But I can't get unit.name (or any other data for that matter). I have checked entity permissions and I'm pretty sure that's all fine.

I also made the "{% if unit %}" condition to check if I actually got any unit object and that returns true.

Have I missed anything? I have the record id but for some reason I can't display the record data.

Br

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Christian Leverenz 1,214 on at

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Hi @oml ,
thanks for accepting my comment as a solution, glad to be able to help aout.
concerning the entity:
could it be, that you did not use the correct attributenamen?
for example unit.id could be unit.crc17_propertyunitid and unit.name is presumably unit.crc17_name
bacause you have to use the attributenames from crm and not just id and name as these are not lookups 🙂
Hope it helps,
Christian

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l.oliver 147 on at

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You are the real MVP, @chleverenz ! Thanks a lot!

My attribute name was indeed incorrect - I have been starring too long at this. Gotta call it a day.. 😉

Cheers!

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mcin9781 on at

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Hey Thanks for the follow up, hopefully this information will help future community members.

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