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Change column headings for an Entity List in Power Apps Portal

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When you build an entity list for display in a Power Portal the column headings may not suit your requirements. For example:

The column headings are too long for the data and will waste valuable screen estate on a mobile device. I renamed the columns to look like this:

This is an improvement, but the column widths still aren’t right. The Invoice Number column is too wide and the customer name and reference could do with being wider to prevent wrapping. Fortunately you can make both changes in the same place.

Change column display names and widths for an Entity List on a Power Apps Portal

  1. Go into Portals Management App.
  2. Navigate Entity Lists.
  3. Choose the Entity List that you want to modify.
  4. Click on the Options tab.
  5. Enable “Advanced Settings” by clicking the tick box at the top grid configuration:
    Image showing how to enabled advanced options for a PowerApps Portal Entity List
  6. Scroll Down to the Section labelled “Override Column Attributes”
  7. Add an entry for each column that you want to rename:
    Image showing how to change the display names of Entity Lists in a PowerApps Portal
  8. Put in a value for the width. You can choose between percentage or pixels widths.
  9. Scroll to the bottom of the grid configuration and choose between Percent or Pixels in the Grid Column Width Style drop-down.

I was quite pleased with how much better the Entity list looked after these small modifications:

Power Automate: Get a single record from CDS List Records action

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You can easily retrieve the unique identifier of a record in CDS within flow using the List Records action. But this approach will create an “Apply to each” loop, even if there is only one possible result.

Image showing unwanted "Apply to Each" loop when querying a single record from Common Data Service.

I needed to get the accountid from the Account entity to create a new record in a related table. My list records action looks like this:

Image showing "List Records" action in Microsoft Power Automate.

Note that “Top Count” is set to 1.

The next step of the flow where the new record is created. You can stop the Apply to Each loop being created by using the “first” function. Example code:

first(body('List_records')?['value'])?['accountid']
Image showing how to create a new record in Common Data Service using only a single result from a "List Records" action in Microsoft Power Automate.
Image of Microsoft Flow Expression and the use of the "First" function which can give you the first result from a record set.

Then you can continue to your next action without having to deal with a for each loop. It makes the flow neater and easier to comprehend.

Power Apps: Recover accidentally deleted Portal Management App

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If you’ve accidentally deleted your Power Apps Portal Management Application you can get it back pretty easily as it is just a model driven app. Here is how to do it:

  1. Login to the Power Apps Portal.
  2. Click on New App and Select “Model-driven”:
  3. Enter the details of the app and ensure you select “Use existing solution to create the App”
  4. Click Next
  5. Select “Dynamics 365 Portals – Portal Base” as the solution and “Dynamics 365 Portals” for the site map:
  6. Click Done
  7. Click Publish on the next screen.