After my detailed post on Power Apps Custom component framework, I have getting loads of queries and among them the common ones are
- How do we get organization details within my Power Apps custom control
- How to get context user information
- How to get record information on which the control is embedded
- How to query Web API from my control code.
The answer to all of these lies in the context object that gets passed to the init method of your control. Just like with Plugin context, the control context contains all information about the current environment in which it is executing.
So let’s explore what the context has in store for us. And what’s better way than the wonderful developer tools of Chrome browser. Below is a screenshot of the property bag that context contains.
The important ones I just highlighted. So let’s go a bit granular on the highlighted one.
1. page:
context.page can help you with useful values like the id of the current app which is loaded, the guid of the record and the logical name of the record on which the control is showing up.
And also our very own lovable method – getClientUrl().
2. orgSettings
I think the name justifies all. This gives us all the values related to the CRM organization. And this is the same one you get when you query for Organization Settings using Xrm.Utility.getGlobalContext()
3. userSettings
This will give you information about the logged in user security roles, language code, user id etc.
4. webAPI
Well this can be very important. Specially if you want to query CRM web api from your control. Here you get all the methods to communicate with CRM Web API.
Hope that gives you all the information to get started with your first custom component.
Hope this helps!
Debajit Dutta
(Dynamics MVP)
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I saw in your example, you used a reference to Xrm.Page to get the logical name of the attribute.
I don’t seem to find anywhere documentation what is available for parameters.
In my current project we’re discussing to use a custom control, but we need to know if a field is required.
However we are online and Xrm.Page will be no longer valid.
Wondering if there is a way to use the parameter itself to get this kind of information?
Hi Birgit,
Thanks for reading my blog. For sake of time and length I have used Xrm.Page and also mentioned it is deprecated. Actually I did’t find any way to get the form context but what you can do is store the formContext in a global variable which should be available inside your component code. Let me see if I can try it. I will let you know.
Cheers!
Debajit
Hi Debajit ,
I was just reading your blog.I want to update the record in crm through my custom control but webapi object is null for me.
Any idea for this.
I have observed this too and this started happening with some latest release in online..May be you need to tell explicitly enabling WebApi..try as mentioned in this link – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/component-framework/manifest-schema-reference/uses-feature
Thanks a lot i tried it and it works like charm.Many Thanks for the info