I’ve been working on XrmToolBox Tools for a bit now, both speaking and posting on the huge number of cool tools and how we can build our own. I’m still working on a few XrmToolBox related projects, but when I started diving into Power Apps, I immediately wondered if I could replicate some Tools in Canvas or Model Driven Apps. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build out a suite of some administrator or developer tools as Power Apps?

In my post Building XrmToolBox Tools, Part 2, we build an example Tool that allows admins to view the list of Users with a Security Role assignment. It’s a relatively simple tool but it can be pretty useful if you need a quick check on a Role for migrations, troubleshooting, etc. This seemed like as good a candidate as any for a new ‘Admin Tool’ Power App.

Security Role Member Manager!

The proposed functionality for the tool is pretty simple: provide a list of Security Roles in the system, and when the user selects a Role, show the list of assignments. This was meant to be written in about an hour, so that was the extent of the capabilities. Since we have a bit more time, we can add some features. How about we display the list of Teams that have the selected Role assignment and allow Adding or Removing a User or Team to the selected Role.

These requirements are a pretty good candidate for a Canvas App. We can build this using the following components:

• Common Data Service (CDS) connector – provides the list of Security Roles
• Office 365 Users Connector – provides the user picture
• Gallery – bound to the Security Roles list
• Gallery – bound to the list of Users related to the Security Role
• Gallery – bound to the list of Teams related to the Security Role

The main screen layout and functionality is also fairly simple. Bind the main grid to to the Security Roles list, and on the select event, bind the secondary lists to the related Users and Teams. No real code behind, just some simple data binding to galleries.

Here is the initial main screen for the Power App:

Some challenges, some solutions

With the XrmToolBox Tool, I wrote some code to retrieve Security Roles and and User Security Role assignments using the standard SDK Query Expression methods. The list of Security Roles was a simple Retrieve Multiple while the User Role Assignment is a many-to-many relationship.

The many to many is where I stumbled a bit. When I select my Security Role, I want to retrieve the Users and Teams which are both many-to-many relations to Security Roles. The CDS connector does not list the join table as an Entity, so I couldn’t simply add a new Data Source for User or Team and filter by the selected Role. Fortunately, support has been added for many-to-many relationships in the CDS connector. Here is an excellent blog post on the feature by Greg Lindhorst, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft: Relate records in Many-to-Many relationships

So to render the list of Users and Teams, I can bind the galleries using a simple formula. The main screen gallery from which you select a Security Role is named ‘Security Roles List’. So the User and Teams gallery Items property can be set using these simple formulas respectively:

'Security Roles List'.Selected.Users 

'Security Roles List'.Selected.Teams

As you can see in Greg’s post, adding and removing Users and Teams are fairly easy too. To remove a User from the selected Security Role, we need a single line formula added to our gallery button:

Unrelate('Security Roles List'.Selected.Users, ThisItem)

That statement passes the selected Security role and the currently selected User to the Unrelate formula, and we’re done!

Next Steps

I plan on a follow up post with a bit more functionality. For example, I like the inline model for selecting a User shown in the post by Greg above, but I think selecting multiple Users and Teams works better. Another nice feature will be to distinguish between Business Units. Right now, this pulls all Security Roles for the entire organization.

This sounds like an obvious one, but I also plan on adding a confirmation dialog before removing the User or Team from a Security Role. This was a bit more complicated than I had expected, so I will write up more detail on how this will be implemented.

As I was working on this sample Power App, I came across a great post User Admin PowerApp (Part 4) by d365Cooky that proposes a similar tool, but for managing Security Roles for a selected User. I like the idea of embedding this into Dynamics 365 CE. By the way, I saw the link via Guido Preite’s dynamicsweekly.com newsletter. If you have not already signed up for this, get to it!

I’ll post notes on all these updates with more detail on how it was built, including the full solution for download in a follow up post.

Powerful stuff!

I feel like I have said that a LOT recently! In a relatively short time, I built a functioning Power App that will allow administrators to manage the Security Role Users and Teams. I put this together in a few hours, including some reading on the CDS connector capabilities and designing a few screens. All of this was done using the existing connectors and no custom code outside of the standard Canvas App formulas.

This is not as complex a tool as you may find in the XrmToolBox, and I am definitely going to continue any contribution I can to the XrmToolBox! But I think this once again demonstrates how the Power Platform allow us to provide low code/no code solutions to your users.

In the meantime, as always, any comments, suggestions, or questions are appreciated!