Allowing users to see a Calendar in Dynamics Portals

Currently the Event Management features that were previously available in Adxstudio Portals is not available for Dynamics Portals. Through an entity list there is a feature that can be enabled to display the entity list as a Calendar which is what I walk through in this vlog.

Enabling Calendar in Entity List

In my vlog I use the scenario of registering an event to attend to in Westoros. The entity list I created is based on the custom Event entity I created. Scroll down in the entity list till you get to the Calendar View tab. 

In this tab this is where you can configure your entity fields in the Entity Field Mappings section. The fields that you want to select in the desired entity must be of the following type:

• Start Date and End Date must be Date and Time fields
• Summary, Description and Location must be Single Line of Text fields
• Organizer must be a Lookup field
• Is All Day must be a Two Option field

The next section to configure is Settings. In here you can define the following

• Initial View - this is how the records are presented in a visual date format. You have Year, Week, Month and Day to choose from
• Time Zone Display Mode - this is whether the record is presented in the user's local time zone or a Specific Time Zone. 
• Display Time Zone - this must be populated if a specific time zone was selected
• Style - this is the visual format of the calendar where it can be displayed as a full calendar or a summarized list of record with a smaller calendar

Once you have set configured the Entity Field Mappings and Settings, time to clear your portal cache and see it take effect. Ta da. No code required. Awesome sauce.

Going one step further

For those of you who want to change the look and feel of the calendar, please refer to Colin's blog posts 

• Dynamics 365 portals: Implement FullCalendar with Liquid
• Dynamics 365 portals: Events and iCalendar Download with Liquid - this is what I showed briefly in my vlog

Dynamics 365 for Marketing

OK so there is another offering where you can have a portal preconfigured purely for the purpose of marketing which you can read about it here.

It is currently in preview and is not available yet to the general public. You can wait for this to become available however I am not 100% sure what the pricing will be and whether it can be included in a current Customer Engagement subscription.

Summary

It is possible to show a calendar in Dynamics Portals through Entity Lists. To extend the out-of-the-box functionality, Colin's blog posts (see above links) outlines how JSON or XML can be referenced by liquid templates and how an iCalendar can be downloaded.

If you are going to have a go with this out-of-the-box, you do need to have the administration web role so that you can clear the cache and review your configurations.

Till next time, toodles.