Microsoft Dynamics Business Central (On-Premises or On-SaaS) – PowerApps Gateway Agents – Use Case (Part 1)

Scenario:

This part 1 blog is to give small idea, hint or knowledge on how you can use PowerApp Gateway Agents with Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and what are the purposes / use case of using it. Part 2 is already available to publish, but it was personal idea of providing the introduction first on what you’re doing before its practical working.

Pre-requisites:

• Microsoft Dynamics Business Central (knowledge and access)
• On-Premises Data Gateway (configured and installed)
• Microsoft PowerApps (access)

Read more: Microsoft Dynamics Business Central (On-Premises or On-SaaS) – PowerApps Gateway Agents – Use Case (Part 1)

Flow:

All right sections are Microsoft Solutions used for interface.

References (English-Singapore):

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-sg/power-automate/gateway-reference
• https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-sg/downloads/
• https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-sg/blog/gateway-management-on-power-platform-admin-center/
• https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-sg/blog/connect-to-your-on-premises-data-sources-using-on-premises-data-gateway-from-powerapps/

Microsoft Dynamics Business Central (On-Premise) – DocFx – simple help generator

Scenario:

This blog is to give small idea, hint or knowledge on how you can use DocFx for generating a simple static documentation portal.

Just to give the idea, this same tool is used by Microsoft for maintaining ‘https://docs.microsoft.com‘ hosted on GitHub. I will be showing, and hosting pages created using DocFx on App server instead of using WordPress / Github page or other provider for hosting the help manual.

Pre-requisites:

• Markdown language
• YAML/JSON understanding
• DocFx (from Github) – The same can be installed using Nuget or Chocalatey package (which is NOT shown on this post)

Read more: Microsoft Dynamics Business Central (On-Premise) – DocFx – simple help generator

Why use DocFx:

• Cross-platform support. (Also runs on MacOS and Linux, hence easy to deploy using Pipelines)
• Custom or multiple themes supported.
• Easy to coordinate and maintain on repos.
• Seamless integration with your source code (for examples, any APIs published). You can allow to view source code on an API.

Getting Started with Templates:

• After you download docfx.zip from provided reference link (below), extract it to a local folder.
• You can create a first project by typing below commands on PowerShell (make sure that you on folder where docfx.exe exists):
  • docfx init -q
• Alternatively, if you wanted to host or create project folder at /inetpub/wwwroot/<folder> you can type same above command as follows:
  • docfx init -o “/inetpub/wwwroot/<folder>” -q
• On running this command, DocFx creates a basic default template folder with api, apidoc and articles folders plus contents.

Getting Started with Building website:

• Run below command on PowerShell to check default template:
  • docfx.exe "/inetpub/wwwroot/<folder>/docfx.json" --serve -p <port_number>

• After a without error run, the pages are created and can be checked on localhost as shown below (this will only run until serve command is running):

Getting Started with updating contents on website:

• Now as you are confident on using DocFx and building website, try updating/adding new .md files and then run DocFx build command.
• Make sure you give correct ‘image’ or media path for them to be included on website.
• If you have more media folders on DocFx, add them in Docfx.json file as well:

Tips:

• You should be good to track your folders with pages (hence use repos to make sure you don’t lose or add anything wrong).
• For adding a search bar, add “ExtractSearchIndex” in “globalMetadataFiles” in docfx.json

Before change	After change
“postProcessors”: []	“postProcessors”: [“ExtractSearchIndex”]

• DO NOT change docfx.json without a proper knowledge.
• Use help command or access ‘http://dotnet.github.io/‘ for more details and walkthroughs.

References:

• Download DocFx from https://github.com/dotnet/docfx/releases (download docfx.zip from the link)
• You can also use: https://github.com/microsoft/dynamics365smb-custom-help/tree/main/HtmlFromRepoGenerator which is also created using DocFx component. More details are at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/help/custom-help-toolkit-htmlfromrepogenerator

Let me know on how useful this tutorial was and I will extend to show BC APIs functionality on DocFX.