Author / Simon Doy

Posts by Simon Doy

I am an avid SharePoint enthusiast who works as an Independent SharePoint Consultant based in Leeds, United Kingdom. I am one of the organisers of the Yorkshire SharePoint User Group in the United Kingdom. I have been designing and building SharePoint solutions since 2006.
by Simon Doy

Top Tip to Improve Your SharePoint List Filtering


If you use SharePoint lists as much as we do, one of the challenges you might have is, How do quickly find the information you need?

This feature I will have to say passed me by and after discussions with a few others, I fortunately was not the only one!

The other day I saw an X / Twitter post about how to programmatically set filters in SharePoint lists.

I thought to myself well that is great but how do you do it via the SharePoint interface so then I discovered this feature.

So, we have had the filter pane for a while, and I have used it by clicking on the column I want to filter and choosing the value to filter by, as shown below.

However, since December 2021 you have had the filter pane which allows you to quickly select filters on multiple columns!

This is a great feature and I will be honest not something that I had picked up on.

You can configure the columns that are displayed in this filter pane using the column, column settings Pin or Unpin from the filters pane.

Anyway, that is it a quick tip to make life easier when you are using Microsoft SharePoint lists and need to filter your data more quickly!

Hope that helps!

by Simon Doy

Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse gets stuck “Fetching app…”


Introduction

In this post I am documenting the approach that we took to fixing an issue when setting up the Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse.

We followed the instructions that Microsoft laid out which are detailed in this post,

Create an Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with your Azure Synapse Workspace.

It is important to get the permissions right within Azure for the Blob Storage rights to the Azure Storage Account.

The problem was when we set up the Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse, after you choose your tables and click Save. The setup would start but get stuck with a message saying “Fetching app….” at the top of the screen. I waited and waited but nothing happened.

An example is shown below.

After a lot of head-scratching and checking the documentation, we ended up launching a call with Microsoft Support.

Microsoft Support to the rescue

Our support engineer, Kristiana, asked us to create network traces and eventually, we could see a request to Azure AD Application failing for app id: f3b07414-6bf4-46e6-b63f-56941f3f4128.

Kristiana came back to us and said that we were missing an Azure AD sorry Microsoft Entra Service Principal for Power Query.

The fix was the following:

Prerequisites:

User with privileges to create a service principal in Azure tenant (Tenant admin):

o Application Administrator
o Global Administrator

Create principal in the Azure tenant:

  • Launch Powershell
  • Connect to the tenant by running the following command; you’ll be prompted to authenticate. Login using credentials for the Azure tenant admin
  • Connect-AzAccount 
  • The subscription shouldn’t matter as we’re adding a new service principal to the tenant
  • Add the principal by running the following command
  • New-AzADServicePrincipal -ApplicationId ‘f3b07414-6bf4-46e6-b63f-56941f3f4128’

The Azure Synapse Link process was tried again and it worked, after a few weeks of trying we had a successful Azure Synapse Link setup!

Anyway hope that helps.