Features in latest release of Power Virtual Agent

We all are aware that if we want to add any sophisticated stuff like adaptive cards or forms or http requests in the classic power virtual agent, we had to develop it in Azure bot framework composer and import that in the Power virtual agent. With the latest release which is termed as PVA2 by many, these features are readily available in the PVA itself. In this series of posts, let us have a look at these latest features and how to use these features

If we have our existing bot which is developed in classic version, we have an option to clone this bot and open it in the new canvas. Refer MS documentation link

If we click on convert Few points to be noted here are

Notes: Few important aspects about the migration we should be aware of

  • The cloning process will only clone topics built using the Power Virtual Agents web canvas
  • Topics configured using Bot composer framework will not be clones
  • A bot administrator needs to reconfigure authorization, channels and security settings in the cloned unified authoring bot.
  • The connection to Power Automate Flows, built using the Power Virtual Agents web canvas, will be cloned and associated within the topic within the cloned unified authoring topic, however it is strongly recommended that the connections are tested.
  • Bot Id would be changed, so reconsider any logic where you have used the bot ID
  • Also note that the functionality of https trigger from bot composer framework will not be available in new bot. At the moment the new authoring canvas only supports the http triggers using Power automate. Any API call should only go

Now let us go through the latest updates in Power virtual agent. Each of the feature may need a separate post in itself, hence just listing those here.

Several use interface related changes

Auto conversation start from the bot

Pass entire Objects back to Power Virtual Agents using Power Automate

Variables, Variable Watch Window Improvements and Testing

We can trigger the bot conversation based on some event

Write the bot in YAML

GPT Enabled Features

Advanced options

Use Power Fx in the PVA with variables

Adding Power Fx

Using Bot framework composer features with the PVA authoring canvas itself

Using Adaptive Cards
Bot framework composer features in PVA canvas

Lets see the actual usage of these features in my next posts.

Till that time happy bot developing 😊

Dataverse Long Term Data Retention (Preview) – Part 3

In previous post , we have seen how to create retention policies and view run history of the retention polices. In this post let us see how to view the retained data and limitations of the data retention feature

View Retained Data

Now lets us see how to access these retained records in Dynamics. We can go to any view and click on edit filter.

In the Edit filters we can see “Change to retained data”. By selecting this we can see the retained data

After we select this, it will prompt for confirmation and lets click Change to retained data

It will automatically flip the option to “Change to Live data” in case we want to see live data

If we observe , we can see “*” in front of the view stating that its showing retained data 

Note- Once the data is successfully moved to  data lake, this data is purged from the Dataverse data base. This can not moved back to the database

Limitations for retrieval of retained data

This restrictions are enforced by Dataverse for each environment:

  • Up to five users can query and retrieve retained data at the same time.
  • Up to 30 queries per day are allowed for each environment.
  • Any single request from advanced find, Power Automate cloud flow, or Dataverse OData public API is considered as one query.
  • Queries are allowed on one table at a time. Joins and aggregation functions aren’t allowed.
  • Retained data includes lookup data. Lookup values in the table are denormalized with ID and name value.

Once we have established the retention policies now we need to review the impact on capacity reports. Lets us see how this is demonstrated in the capacity report

Capacity Reports

When we look at the capacity report after establishing the retention policy, at the moment retained data is also shown in the capacity reports, however for the retained data the tables are shown separately. If these tables don’t top in the storage use, we may download the list of tables and there we can find the tables with suffix of -Retained and their consumption.

We can filter the table names with Retained Suffix

We can see the table capacity usage. 

Note - At the moment Microsoft has not provided any bifurcation on how they would charge for database storage vs Datalake storage and this is preview, hence this million dollar question is still unanswered. 
Also for each query to fetch the records for data retention, API requests available in our plan will be counted for these calls
One good thing is these retention policies are solution aware, so unlike bulk deletion jobs, we do not have to recreate these in all environments separately.

Apart from looking for the archival solution, we also had to look at the reasons for such exponential increase in the data size post PVA + Omnichannel implementation. I will share few findings in my next blog post.