About a month ago, I released the first version of the Power Apps Portal Dependencies Checker XrmToolBox Tool. The initial release allows you to search for CDS component references in your Portal Configuration. This actually helped me out a bit shortly after releasing the tool. I needed to check for references to a CDS Entity Form before I renamed it, so this saved me some time in debugging.

This week, I am posting a feature update in the dependencies search – searching for references within your Portal Configuration for … Portal Configuration!

Ok, what I mean by this is that you can search your Portal Configuration records for references to other Portal Configuration items not easily done using Advanced Find queries. For example, I can find which Page Templates reference a Web Template using the Related area or an Advanced Find query. But I often need to know when one Web Template references a Content Snippet or even another Web Template. Which Web Templates extend the Web Template named Layout 1 Column?

Some details…

Implementing this feature means searching fields supporting Liquid Templates amongst the Portal Configuration records. In the screen shot above, we can see the results of searching for Web Templates named Breadcrumbs, Footer, and Layout 1 Column. We can see the results showing a list of Web Template references. Most places in Portals that allow Liquid are well known, such as the Source (adx_source) field on Web Templates or Custom JavaScript (adx_registerstartupscript) or Copy (adx_copy) on Web Pages. But I also found that you can add Liquid to the Instructions (adx_instructions) field on an Entity Form.

You could argue that this can also be accomplished using Advanced find and Contains/Like, but that means the potential for lots of noise in your results. Search for the Home Web Template and see what kind of results you get!

The Tool actually uses FetchXml and the like operator for the first pass of results then some matching on the Liquid Tags related to the items being searched. For example, when searching for a Web Templates, I search for instances of {% extends 'Home' %} or {% include 'Home' %} using some regular expressions.

With this release, you can search for the following Portal Configuration items:

Power Apps Portals supports several other tags, such as ads, blogs or polls, but I focused on core elements for this release. I will be adding those and others in a follow up release. I believe this will expand both the items being searched and items for which we are searching.

I hope this additional functionality comes in handy during your Power Apps Portals work.

As always, questions, comments, and suggestions are all welcome. If you have issues, please post a new issue on github!