How to enable In-App Notification in Dynamics 365 CE

In-app notifications allow Dynamics 365 users to receive contextual messages directly within a model-driven app such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, or Field Service.

Notifications can appear as:

• Toast notifications on the right side of the application.

• Notification centre messages accessed through the bell icon.

Notifications remain in the notification centre until the user dismisses them or they expire. The default expiry period is 14 days, although this can be changed when the notification is created.

How to Enable In-App Notifications

The feature must be enabled separately for each model-driven app.

1. Go to make.powerapps.com.

2. Open the solution containing the model-driven app.

3. Select the app and choose Edit.

4. Open Settings.

5. Select Features.

6. Enable In-app notifications.

7. Save and publish the app.

The notification setting is stored at the individual model-driven app level.

How Notifications Are Created

Notifications can be generated using:

• Power Automate.

• JavaScript or the Dataverse Web API.

• A plug-in or custom integration.

• The Dataverse SendAppNotification action.

• Direct creation of records in the Notification table.

Notifications created through SendAppNotification are stored in the Dataverse Notification table, with the logical name appnotification.

Required Security Privileges

There are 4 tables to keep in mind so notifications work smoothly.

• Notification (appnotification): This is where notifications are stored.

• Model-Driven App User Setting (appusersetting): The table stores app-specific settings and preferences for each user.

• Setting Definition (settingdefinition): This table contains the definition of notification-related settings that the model-driven app reads. The user needs Read and Append To privileges because the Model-driven App User Setting record references the relevant Setting Definition record.

• Send In-App Notification (prvSendAppNotification): To send notifications to others.

Assign the following Privileges

Notification

• Create, Read and Delete

• The close or cross button deletes the individual appnotification record. Without Delete access, users may see the close button but be unable to dismiss individual notifications.

• You may give User, BU or ORG level depending on the access you want to assign.

Model-driven App User Setting

• Create, Read, Write and Append.

• These are ORG level access.

Setting Definition

• Read and Append To

• These are ORG level access.

Send In-App Notification

• ORG level access under Miscellaneous privileges tab.

These privileges allow the notification bell, notification centre and user notification settings to work correctly.

To sse “Dismiss All”, the user requires:

• Model-driven App User Setting

• Setting Definition

Dismiss All does not immediately delete every notification record. It updates the user setting so that older notifications are no longer retrieved.

Hope this helps!

Field Service pricing vs ERP pricing: How to turn off the Clash

In Dynamics 365 Field Service, pricing and cost can be calculated by Field Service itself (using features like price lists, products, services, agreement pricing, etc. within Field Service). However if you'd like, you can always disable it.

This happened in one of our environments that a solution dependency was created. When I looked, there was a solution installed with the name: msdyn_FieldServiceDisablePricingComponents

I tried looking at sources from where I can download and install this solution. However, this simple setting in Field Service solves it.

When people say “install the Field Service Disable Pricing Components solution”, they’re usually referring to a built-in capability controlled by Field Service Settings, not a separate managed solution you import into Dataverse.

The practical outcome:

• Field Service stops calculating price and/or cost
• Another system becomes the source of truth (e.g., Project Operations, Finance & Operations, or an ERP)

Prerequisites

Before you change settings, make sure you have:

• Administrator rights to the Power Platform environment (System Administrator / Field Service Admin equivalent).
• Dynamics 365 Field Service installed in the environment.
• Access to the Field Service app and the Settings area.

Step-by-step: Disable pricing components

Step 1: Sign in

• Open the browser.
• Sign in to your Dynamics 365 Field Service instance.
  

Step 2: Open Field Service Settings

• Go to the Field Service app.
• In the sitemap (left navigation), switch to Settings (typically near the bottom).
• Under General, select Field Service Settings.

Step 3: Change Work Order / Booking pricing options

• Open the Work Order / Booking tab.
• Update these settings:
• Calculate Price = No
• Calculate Cost = No
• Select Save & Close.

That’s it—Field Service will stop calculating those values internally.

Dual-write | Initial Sync for newly added Legal Entities in Dual-write (D365 F&O → Dataverse)

When you add a new legal entity in a Dual-write enabled environment, this checkbox decides whether
you want to sync data for the newly added legal entity.

Also, without impacting existing legal entities.

The Core Concept

The checkbox "Skip initial write for newly added legal entities" controls whether an initial sync (initial write) is triggered from Dynamics 365 FO to Dataverse when a new legal entity is added.

Two possible behaviors:

1) Checkbox is checked

• Initial sync is skipped
• No data is written automatically for that legal entity
• You must manually trigger syncs later

2) Checkbox is unchecked (recommended for initial sync)

• Initial sync runs automatically
• Sync applies only to the newly added legal entity
• Existing legal entities are not reprocessed
• Better performance and cleaner execution

👉 Bottom line:
Unchecking this box is the correct and safest way to run an initial sync only for the new legal entity.

When To Use This

A common real-life scenario:

• Dual-write is already running and live with other legal entities.
• A new company / legal entity is introduced later.
• You want data to sync only for the new entity, without disturbing production data.

Step-by-Step: Perform Initial Sync for a New Legal Entity

Step 1: Open Dual-write

Navigate to: Workspaces → Data management → Dual-write

Step 2: Open Environment Details

Click Environment details from the Dual-write workspace.

Step 3: Go to Legal Entities

Select Legal Entities to view the list of companies enabled for Dual-write.

Step 4: Add the New Legal Entity

• Click Add Legal Entity.
• ❌ Uncheck: Skip initial writes for newly added legal entities
• Click Save

Step 5: Confirm Sync Completion

• Once the system finishes syncing table maps, you’ll see: Legal entities updated successfully!

This confirms the initial write has been triggered only for the new legal entity.

What Happens Behind the Scenes

• Dual-write runs initial write only for the new legal entity.
• Existing legal entities are untouched.
• No historical reprocessing.
• No performance degradation.
• Table maps are reused automatically.
• Makes incremental rollout safe.

Hope this helps!

All about Addresses in Dynamics 365

We had a requirement regarding addresses that had to be addressed in Dynamics 365 CE. I thought to share it.

Requirements

• To be able to select the following fields as a dropdown, preferably a lookup. Fields: District, City and Country because the District and City list may continue to expand in the future.
• To be able to add multiple addresses against the Account. 2 or more.
• In case we need to update an address, there must be a provision in the Address table to select the District, City and Country as well. i.e., these fields must be available in the Address table as lookup fields.

These requirements sound simple to implement, however the address entity lacks flexibility due to which we had to think of a workaround.

Things I have learnt about Addresses

1. On the Account we can add maximum 2 addresses. Address 1 and Address 2. Let's call this embedded address. If we need to add a 3rd address related to an account, we need to create a new address record (in the related system Address table).
2. While the Country and State fields are available, these are text fields in the embedded address and related system address table.
3. The related address table is non-customizable. We cannot add additional lookup fields in that entity.
4. When an Account or Contact record is created, blank Address records are automatically created and linked to the Account (or Contact). These are associated with the embedded address records and are numbered as "addressnumber" 1 and 2. addressnumber 1 represents invoice address and 2 represents delivery address by default.
5. The system Address tables don't have lookup to Account or Contact. The relationship is identified by 2 fields namely, "objecttypecode" and "parentid". objecttypecode recoginzes if this related address is linked to "Account" or "Contact" and parentid is the actual GUID value of the Account or Contact.

Workaround to address the limitations

Since the system Address entity is linked and tightly integrated in Dynamics 365 CE, we couldn't replace the system Address table with new custom Address table. I am saying this because, system Address primarily linked to Account and Contact, but when we update the address on Lead and qualify it, the embedded Address and correspondingly the system Address records are also updated. Also, indirectly linked with Opportunities, Quotes and beyond. If you're considering dual write integration with Dynamics 365 F&O, these are again tightly integrated there.

Having analyzed this, we went ahead with a custom Address entity but ensured we are keeping the system Address entity records in sync as well.

What did we do?

1. We created 3 custom lookup fields called District, City and Country on the Lead, Account and Contact tables for easy data entry from users perspective. When the user selects these fields, we populate the OOB District, State and Country text fields and those are automatically updated in the related system address records.
2. We introduced a custom address entity and ensured the user uses this for their data entry and viewing. When the user updates the embedded address, we also need to create custom address records related to Account.
3. When the custom address records are updated, we need to update the related system address entity records.
4. When a new custom address is created, we create a related system address entity record and link it with the respect Account by updating the objecttypecode and parentid.
5. When the custom address is deleted, we need to also delete the related system address record and update the embedded addresses if the addressnumber matches. By update I mean we had to clear the values in the embedded address fields on the Account record.
6. For the most part we can treat system Addresses as a target only, as they are a copy of the custom Address entity data. We can set up a business process and data entry process in such a way that system addresses are not updated, however, if some process we don’t know about updates a system Address, it needs to get reflected up to the custom Address as well.

Hope that helps!

D365 CE | Identify and clean up storage space

Accumulation of data over time can lead to storage issues that in turn impacts system performance in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE). If you're receiving constant notifications, it means you are reaching the capacity limits or already over capacity.

Here's how you can analyze the database capacity usage and steps you can follow to clean up the data using Power Platform, Bulk Record Deletion and Advanced Find.

Check Database Capacity

Here are the steps:

• To check database capacity navigate to Power Platform Admin Center.
• Click on Resources > Capacity. This takes you to the summary page that shows you the overall database usage and percentage available / over. In this case you can see that the Log is much over capacity. So let's see what do these Logs contain.

• If you click on Dataverse located across  the page as a tab next to Summary, you can see all the Environments and usage based on area like Database, File or Log storage.
• Click on the chart icon to see the details.

• Here you can see based on the area and tables that are occupying the most storage. In the below image you can see how the Log usage for table AuditBase has been growing exponentially.

So let's delete the Audit Logs and follow other methods to delete data from specific tables.

Free up storage capacity

• To do so, navigate to Power Platform Admin Center and click on the Environments.
• Select the Environment for which we need to delete the audit logs.

• Select Delete Audit Logs. You can also setup how long you want to retain the logs for for automatic ongoing maintenance.

• A window will pop-up from the right where one can select appropriate action.

Note: The system can take up to 24 hours to update storage information. It is recommended to wait up to 24 hours and monitor your storage.

This is one of the methods you can use to free up storage space.

• Similarly you can delete PluginTraceLogs (Advanced Settings > Settings > PlugIn Trace Logs).
• WorkflowBase

• Notes with attachments.

Hope this helps!

D365 CE | Preferred solution in Dataverse

Interesting concept that I recently came across is to "Set your Preferred Solution" in Dataverse.

By default if you do any unmanaged customizations in PowerApps Maker, are created under the default solution. The drawback is if I add a new field, instead of using the prefix for the solution that I have created, it would use the Common Data Service Default Solution prefix (i.e., new_ or cr_).

Microsoft has now provided an option to setup your preferred solution, so any customization you perform even outside your custom solution will automatically be added under your custom solution. To do so, we need to setup the custom solution as a Preferred Solution.

Here are the steps:

• When you login to PowerApps Maker, you can see there is an option to select the preferred solution.
• Click on Manage or click Set preferred solution.

• Select the solution from the dropdown or create a new solution.

• Once the preferred solution has been setup, you can test by going to the default solution and creating a new field or updating the character limit of an existing field. You will notice that the changes are automatically reflect in the preferred solution too.

Hope it helps!

Solved – Power Automate: Cannot write more bytes to the buffer than the configured maximum buffer size: 104857600

We had designed a power automate flow and used the List rows action step. While running the flow, we received the below error.

BadRequest. Http request failed as there is an error: 'Cannot write more bytes to the buffer than the configured maximum buffer size: 104857600.'.

Screenshot of the error below.

This happens because there is a 100 MB Message Size limits in Power Automate.

Solution

• Allow Chunking if it is supported by the action.

• Or be specific with the columns you want to return. In the List Rows action, update the Select columns to limit the data returned.
• Temporarily update the data in the system so that fewer rows are returned. For example, if your condition is to return all the rows where field_name does not contain data. Say this is return 5000 rows. Now update few rows with some sample data and run the flow so that it returns limited rows for processing. (This is not recommended in production, but could be a quick fix if the client agrees to it).

Hope this helps!

Troubleshoot Dual-Write Issues in Dataverse and F&O Apps

I have written couple of articles on Dual-Write lately. Mostly on issues that we've been facing lately and how we have come to fix them. These post is where I bring them all together. You can think of this blog post as a summary of all the issues and fixes until now and will continue to update the same in the future.

Also certain topics don't need a separate post. Will write about them here directly. Starting below with the posts that I have written previously.

Previous Posts

Unable to create a Quote in Dynamics 365 Sales App

This was because we were receiving an error

"Write failed for entity CDS sales quotation header with unknown exception - BOX API can't be used from non-interactive sessions."

 Click here to read the post.

Privileges required for dual-write initial sync

There are certain security roles and privileges required to perform initial sync of tables via dual-write.

Click here to read the post.

Unable to delete postal addresses in Dynamics 365 Sales

This happened because there were related records, and I wasn't able to delete them too.

Click here to read the post.

Unable to create an order from a quote in Dynamics 365 Sales App

Here is the precise error that I was receiving.

"Write failed for entity CDS sales order lines V2 with unknown exception - Inventory dimension Site is mandatory and must consequently be specified.\nUpdate has been canceled."

Click here to read the post.

Other Issues

Unable to load the dual-write module in a Finance and Operations App

If you're unable to open Dual-write page by selecting the Dual Write tile in the Data management workspace, most likely data integration service is probably down.

For this you would need to create a MS support ticket and request a restart of the data integration service.

Dual-Write | Unable to create Order from Quote in D365 CE Sales

While converting a Quote into an Order in D365 CE Sales, I was receiving an error message that went like:

Dual Write core application error-Dual Write core application error-Unable to write to Finance and Operations apps due to following error(s): {"Write failed for entity CDS sales order lines V2 with unknown exception - Inventory dimension Site is mandatory and must consequently be specified.\nUpdate has been canceled."} Please rectify your data and try again. If issue persists after multiple retries, please contact your system administrator.

Since dual write is seamless integration and data synchronization across D365CE and D365FO and as the default shipping site and warehouse is required while creating the Order in F&O, we need to ensure that the value is populated prior to creating the Sakes Order. 

Solution

While encountering an error can be frustrating, the good news is that there is a solution.

In this case, the remedy involves performing relationship mapping between the Quote and Order entities. Relationship mapping essentially defines how data is transferred between related entities.

Steps:

• Open the solution in D365 Sales App. Ensure you've added the following components:
• Quote and Order tables
• 1:N relationship between Quote and Order
• Open the relationship and click on Relationship Mapping
• Add a new Map and select Default Shipping Site and Default Shipping Warehouse.
• Now try to convert the Quote into an Order.

It should be smooth sailing now.

Hope that helps!

Error when qualifying Lead into Opportunity | D365 Sales

There could be many reasons and most of it could be found when you perform an online search, but none of those suggestions fixed my issue. When I was qualifying the Lead into an Opportunity, it is showing the following error:

OrganizationServiceFault

And that is it. No other details about the error. No error log, not description of the error, no error code. Nothing!

Resolution

My user didn't have system administrator, but a custom role was assigned to the user. I took some help from my technical team who did a little bit of digging and came across this below message.

Entered Microsoft.Dynamics.SCMExtended.Plugins.Plugins.LeadPrimaryContactPostCreate.Execute(), Correlation Id: 021c0dc2-3e1e-46e5-81c0-b1524ae09ed2, Initiating User: e7925424-1da4-ed11-aad1-002248a13b63

Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault]: Principal user (Id=xxxx5424-xxxx-ed11-xxxx-002248a1xxxx, type=8, roleCount=4, privilegeCount=1064, accessMode=0, MetadataCachePrivilegesCount=9751, businessUnitId=0b2c4b59-0e31-ee11-bdf4-000d3aba3d29), is missing prvReadSolution privilege (Id=b64e92c8-5d2a-4052-a026-1b73eff9cebf) on OTC=7100 for entity 'solution' (LocalizedName='Solution').

I provided a Read privilege to Solution table under; relevant Security Role > Customization > Solution, and it worked.

Hope it helps!

Dual-Write | Unable to delete Postal Address Collections in D365 Sales

If you're unable to delete Postal Address Collection records in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Sales App, most likely the reason is there is related Postal Address records under that.

When I try to delete Postal Address records using Advanced find, I couldn't find the Delete button on it. If I open the record (for Postal Address), still couldn't see the delete button.

I used Bulk Record Deletion job to delete Postal Addresses and then I could go ahead and delete Postal Address Collections.

What are these tables you ask? These are added when you implement dual-write and install GAB solution in the dataverse. If the 2 environments are in sync, it is best to delete these records in F&O and let dual-write handle the deletion in D365 CE Sales.

We were in a situation where the F&O environment wasn't in sync with CE and we had to remove these records manually in CE only.

Hope it helps!

Dual-Write | Privileges required for Initial Sync and other considerations

Recently we were doing an initial sync for tables between Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations apps and Dataverse (Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement), and we received an error that read:

Reason: Bad Request, Header x-ms-client-request-id 8aef8aa3-2a01-493e-a0d7-347ce560e50d, Principal team (Id=b7e1929e-xxxx-xxxx-aad0-xxxx489fxxxx, type=9, teamType=0, privilegeCount=0, MetadataCachePrivilegesCount=9751, businessUnitId=b5e1929e-xxxx-xxxx-aad0-xxxx489fxxxx), is missing prvReadmsdyn_globalproduct privilege (Id=539cf392-xxxx-xxxx-b258-xxxx719b7d93) on OTC=10835 for entity 'msdyn_globalproduct' (LocalizedName='Global Product') in Business Unit: unqxxxx (Id=b5e1929e-xxxx-xxxx-aad0-xxxx489fxxxx). context.Caller=691e1af2-xxxx-xxxx-aad1-xxxx489axxxx

Sometimes when you're excited and hurrying into the action, you miss the fine details and here are the fine details.

Security role that is required

Every user in a customer engagement organization with dual-write must be given Dual-Write Runtime User role. Without this role, users will be unable to create any rows in tables in customer engagement organization.

Company and currency exchange tables are global in nature and all dual-write users require read access to these 2 tables. To provide access, all dual-write users must be given Dual-Write App User security role. If a user does not have this security role assigned to them, they will not be able to read tables that contain Company and Currency.

Also access is required to entities (tables in dataverse) that are in scope of dual-write. However which privilege is required is not very clear. What you can do is to create a custom role and provide the relevant privilege to the tables in scope of your dual-write integration. We had provided Create, Read and Write which worked for us.

PS: I do believe Read privilege should be enough. Comment down below if you have an experience regarding the exact privilege required.

Here is the link to other considerations before performing initial sync & setup dual-write security roles and permissions.

Hope this helps!