iFrame Tester

Document Retention: 6 years is always a solid guess

Overview: Documents need to be retained for specific periods and disposed of at a certain point. 

1. PAYE Records: 3 years after the end of the tax year to which they relate
2. Banking records: 6 years
3. Intellectual Property: 6 years
4. Donations: 3 or 6 years
5. Employment Records: Generally, 6 years
6. Health & Safety Policy: The life of the company and historic versions, previous versions  should be kept for a minimum of ten years
7. Most other Health and Safety Documents: Retain for 6 years if there are updates.
8. Accidents and injuries: at least 3 years from the date of reporting
9. Pension scheme records:  life of Pension scheme +
10. Hazardous waste: 3 years
11. Data Protection Act (personal data): Delete as soon as possible
12. Company Documents

• Key company documents: Articles of Association, certificate of incorporation, memorandum of association, stakeholder official documents,  ...:  retained for the life of the company. 
• Directors' contracts & Directors’  qualifying indemnity provisions:  six years after termination or expiry.
• Annual Budgets, quarterly financial reports, VAT records, Statutory Report and Accounts:  6 years
• Corporation Tax records: 7 years after filing
• Contract for purchase of own shares, labour agreements: 10 years from the buying date
• Property Records: 15 years after expiry

Note: This is my rough guide, as lots of people love talking about Document Retention.

Network calls intermittently do not occur in Published play mode on a Canvas app

Problem: An app created does not run Patch or any other network call when published and in run mode. The network calls work in edit mode.  Looking at the logs, I identified some users are successfully updating using network calls

Figure 1. Monitoring shows the Edit/Play working and the Publish/Play not making any network calls.

Initial Hypothesis:

The Patch call works in edit mode, and then intermittently, some users get it to work in Published/Play mode.  This tells me the data in the Patch call is causing the network patch call to fail.

Using a Trace and running in play mode, I remove properties until I find the offending property.

Figure 2. In edit mode, a label control, CurrentDateVaue_1.Text is used

Once, we traced the value of CurrentDateValue_1, which is set by the global variable varCurrentDateTime. As this is done on a random screen, if the user does not open the screen in Publish /Play mode, the label control CurrentDateValue_1.Text is never set. 

Resolution: Replace all the code using CurrentDateValue_1.Text with the variable varCurrentDateTime. The label control is not set when the network/patch call is made, and bizarrely, it does not happen. I'd expect it to send regardless and let the error handling catch the issue.

Opening Canvas App in Edit mode takes excessive time to open

Problem: Two Canvas apps in my enterprise portfolio took over 20 minutes to load in edit mode.

Initial Hypothesis: If I specify the version of a studio in the URL to an old version, the offending app loads in edit mode in under a minute.

&studio-version=v3.24052.30.298708436 onto the Canvas app edit URL

This tells me that something in my app is offending when the latest studio versions are used to edit the app.  While this was okay for a few weeks as a workaround, MS support eventually gave me two settings that fixed both my apps.

Resolution: 

• Turn off "Collection access in component scope"
• Turn on "New analysis engine"

Microsoft Learn company training plans is worth a look

Overview: Microsoft Learn has a nice feature to ensure users are trained on MS technologies. You can create collections of learning resources and add these to plans. Then, specify who should do the training and record the progress.

An example of a plan for new joiners to ensure they are skilled.

Thoughts: I like this tool as you can create a set of courses for users to attend, and it tracks their completion/progress.  For instance, in a Centre of Excellence, users are expected to have completed some training before being given access to a Power Platform Dev environment.

I have not been able to add my own company's content, so I may have a recording of governance and standards for an environment that devs need to be aware of. I'd like the ability to add wikis or mp4s that users watch and then accept they have completed. It may be there, but I can't find it. Also, the portal's branding should allow enterprises to add their own logos. This would be a great Learning Management System (LMS) with customised content.

Power Automate Flows naming for documentation

I was recently shown this format and I think it's fantastic.  I'm moving all my flows to this Action naming approach:

Format: <Original OOTB name of the Action> | <Verb on Noun> 

Also, see my Flow tips here

Pulumi to create App Insights on Azure with VS Code

Overview: Provision Azure App Insights using Pulumi on VS Code using TypeScript, code generate by Pulumi's AI web code engine.  It is so lovely. 

Series on Pulumi:

Introduction and setup Pulumi on VS Code

Pulumi to create App Insights on Azure with VS Code (This post)