Author: Brendan Bowen

This author has written 26 articles
Read more about the article The Dataverse Batch API: A Practical Guide for Power Automate
Dataverse / Power Automate

The Dataverse Batch API: A Practical Guide for Power Automate

If you're a seasoned Power Automate user, no doubt you've encountered performance bottlenecks with bulk CRUD operations against a data source. Using Apply to Each loops can be slow and consume precious API calls per action. This is compounded when the operation involves a large volume of data. This post will discuss how to make use of the Batch API requests with Dataverse to significantly speed up these operations — often down to just one API call! It's a more advanced but extremely powerful technique of interacting with Dataverse. In my fictitious examples, I will be working with…

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August 6, 2026
Read more about the article Application Showcase: A Pokémon Pokédex App built on PowerApps
PowerApps Canvas / PowerShell / SharePoint / Uncategorized

Application Showcase: A Pokémon Pokédex App built on PowerApps

Gotta catch em’ all! Of course, that’s the legendary tag line from the Pokémon series I fondly grew up with. As a Power Platform developer, I thought: why not combine these by building a Pokédex app! A Pokédex is like an encyclopedia about Pokémon. It tracks all kinds of data points about the over 1000 Pokemon in the Pokémon universe. This dataset's rich detail and hierarchical structure make it fantastic for learning to build on in PowerApps. App Goals Use a 3rd party API (PokeAPI) to cache Pokémon information into SharePoint Build a fully responsive Canvas App that…

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July 30, 2026
Read more about the article Fetch SharePoint List Item Version History in PowerApps
Power Automate / PowerApps Canvas / SharePoint

Fetch SharePoint List Item Version History in PowerApps

This article will walk you through two different options for retrieving SharePoint Item Version History in Power Apps using Power Automate. Both solutions are designed to be ALM-friendly and avoid using Premium Connectors. If you’re not familiar with SharePoint Item Version History, you can access it by selecting the context menu for a list item and choosing Version History. Context Menu to access SharePoint item version history The modern modal dialog of a item's version history For this example, I have a simple SharePoint list consisting of Financial Validation events. These events are managed out of a Canvas…

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May 21, 2026
Read more about the article Force Sync Users to a Dataverse Environment
Dataverse / Power Automate / PowerShell

Force Sync Users to a Dataverse Environment

Unlike a default environment in your tenant, which includes all valid users in Entra, other Dataverse environments that use security groups to control access do not automatically sync those users. In order for a user to obtain access to an environment, they need the following: A valid Power Apps license Access to the environment’s security group A security role within the environment If any of those three conditions aren’t met, then nope—no access. Even then, however, the user still won’t automatically show up! The reason is because Dataverse uses just-in-time (JIT) user provisioning, meaning qualified users are only…

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March 31, 2026
Read more about the article Creating a Process Bar Component in Canvas Apps
PowerApps Canvas

Creating a Process Bar Component in Canvas Apps

As a busy user, I appreciate being able to see a visual indicator of the stage/status of an item at a glance. Model-Driven Applications, have Business Process Flows which include a nice visual control, which displays a process bar of the current stage. The process bar in a Model Driven App This led me to wonder: could I create something similar on the Canvas App side? In this post, I’ll demo my custom reusable component that visually represents stages in a Canvas App. The custom canvas app component built Example: Ordering Process Consider an example where you are…

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March 13, 2026
Read more about the article Collect External Responses in Dataverse Using Microsoft Forms
Dataverse / Microsoft Forms / Power Automate / PowerApps Canvas

Collect External Responses in Dataverse Using Microsoft Forms

A common requirement is the need to collect responses from users outside of your organization. Anyone who's spent a good deal of time within Power Platform knows this can quickly turn into a very complex task! I don't want to license external users and I don't want to build a Power Page to collect some simple form responses! Surely there's got a be a simpler way? Well, with the help of the pre-filled URL feature in Microsoft Forms, and a little Power Automate, there is! Scenario: Event Response Submissions In this example, I'm gathering Power Platform Conference Event…

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January 6, 2026
Read more about the article PowerApps Week of Selector Component
PowerApps Canvas

PowerApps Week of Selector Component

Have you ever needed to filter data based on the week of? To use a select-able dropdown, you first need to figure out the week start date based on the current date, week end, build a dynamic collection, filter, date add, sequence… yada yada, blah blah! Instead of doing all that in multiple apps, why not build one reusable component that handles all that tricky date calculation logic? That’s exactly what we’ll cover in today’s post. Component Goals Develop a reusable component that displays the week of start and end date in a dropdown Allow the user to…

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November 12, 2025