Tag / Power Platform

A Shadowy figure in a foggy background.
by Simon Doy

Copilot Studio and Transforming Untyped Objects.


Introduction

The Copilot Studio experiences with UntypedObjects is a bit painful at the moment.

This article helps to show an approach that I took to be able to work with them in Copilot Studio when building Copilot Agents.

Firstly, let’s explain what an UntypedObject is. It is effectively a dynamic object which Copilot Studio does not know what the structure of it is. The object gains a dynamicProperty property which should allow you to read properties but within Copilot Studio currently that seems to go wrong.

The Problem

If you are working with data that Copilot Studio cannot resolve the type of, then you will be working with an UnTypedObject.

An example that I had was with Dataverse where I using a Environment variable to state which environment to connect to. This meant that the data that was being retrieved could not be resolved at design time and so it returned back a record of UntypedObject as shown in the screenshot below.

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

I tried all sorts of different approaches to see if I could make use of the object but ultimately it was the dynamicProperties property that was causing problems as Copilot Studio seemed to want to use that to convert the data and of course my real object did not have that as a property.

In the end, I stumbled on a solution using the Parse JSON activity.

A Solution

I am hoping that there are nicer solutions coming from the Copilot Studio team but this is how I turned the UntypedObject into a Typed Object.

I tried a few different approaches, including using PowerFX Types to see if I could manage the conversion of Type. However, these ended up not working or hitting syntax error issues.

Examples of PowerFX functions

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/power-fx/untyped-object

As I said previously, I then stumbled on the ParseJson activity.

Using the ParseJson Copilot Studio activity, along with a copy of the JSON string object, helped me get over the issues.

Here is what I did. First of all I outputted the whole table to a message using a Send Message activity, as shown below.

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Then, I copied an example of the Json and used that with the ParseJson activity.

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Here is the schema for the Parse JSON activity.

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The output of the ParseJson gave me a variable with a known shape.

Now that I have a variable with a known type, we are golden and everything is working as you would expect.

The data can be used as normal with other activities, such as Power Automate.

A screenshot of a computer AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Problem solved!

Conclusion

As we spend more time working on Copilot Studio solutions, I am sure these experiences will improve. Anyway, I hope you stumble on this and it helps you out.

I spent a few hours trying different things and ultimately found this solution.

Thanks for reading.

an anime character who has a slight beard and no hair, he is slim. He is happy because he has just solved the problem. The character is detailed and they are sat in a corner office. Behind the is a city scape scene.
by Simon Doy

Power Platform Error: Office 365 Connector – List Group Members Fails with Request_ResourceNotFound


This article details the findings of an investigation into a problem that we had with a Power Platform, Power Apps based solution. The reason for the issue is that this organisation needs to be more secure than most.

The organisation operates under numerous compliance and regulatory standards and the application that was built helped them implement one of their compliance based business process .
This solution happened to be one of the first solutions we rolled out. We hit an issue that we had not seen before. Looking around the Internet, it seemed that neither had many others. So, I want to document it and share what we saw so that others can get up and running faster than we did!
As they say, “Sharing Is caring!”

The issue was that a Power App was using the Office 365 Connector to List Group Members and it was failing with the following error:
Office365Groups.ListGroupMembers failed: { “error”: { “code”: “Request_ResourceNotFound”, “message”: “Resource ’33cd8c47-a8dc-XXXX-XXXX-a2a699b80f66′ does not exist or one of its queried reference-property objects are not present.”, “innerError”: { “date”: “2025-01-03T13:55:43”, “request-id”: “e0d458b3-0292-4624-96dc-10a4cccbe4ec”, “client-request-id”: “e0d458b3-0292-4624-96dc-10a4cccbe4ec” } } }

Checking the resource object id, which was for a user, they certainly did exist! Ultimately it was this that led us to the solution which I will detail below.

The code is shown below:

 
Investigation

We quickly realised that it was down to some sort of permission. One of the problems with troubleshooting is you do second guess yourself and we started to wonder if the problem was down to the users not being a member of a group. Well, one of the things that we need to mention is that the member of the group, was a Microsoft Entra ID Security Group. There are various settings which we checked but they never seemed to be the right problem.

The main issue we had is that we have a iThink 365 Development tenant with Power Platform Development environment and we could not recreate the problem.

Another thing to mention is that if a user was a SharePoint Administrator with a Microsoft Entra ID Role then the problem did not occur. We proved this by giving one of the users who we trusted that right and everything worked beautifully.

Anyway, after a couple of days of investigation between the teams I spent some time looking through all the Microsoft Entra ID policies and settings. I found the following Microsoft article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/fundamentals/users-default-permissions.
One of the settings mentioned is “Read Other Users” which has the following description:

This setting is available in Microsoft Graph and PowerShell only. Setting this flag to $false prevents all nonadmins from reading user information from the directory. This flag might prevent reading user information in other Microsoft services like Microsoft Teams.
This setting is meant for special circumstances, so we don’t recommend setting the flag to $false.

The article did not explain how to make the change but after some searching an article was found which uses the Entra ID PowerShell module

The two commands that we used were:
Get Authorization Policy
This is used to get the authorization policy to see if the read other user permission was set to false.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.graph.entra/get-entraauthorizationpolicy?view=entra-powershell

Set Authorization Policy
This is used to set the authorization policy to set the read other user permission to true.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.graph.entra/set-entraauthorizationpolicy?view=entra-powershell

In turned out that the read other users permission was set to false!
Hurrah if we found something that could well be the problem, such a relief.. now to see if worked.

After a discussion with CTO and CIO who then mentioned some other issues that they were seeing ended up being related to this same setting. We got permission to make the change.


How long does the setting take to be applied?


One of the things that we were not sure of was, how long would the setting take to filter through the users.
Funnily enough it seemed to happen very quickly and when one of the users accessed the Power App it worked first time! So, to be safe give your users about 30 minutes for the change to take effect.

Conclusion


In this article I explained an issue we had with the Office 365 Group Connector which was reading the group membership and the users in the group. The Power App connector was failing.
This article explains how to fix the issue by setting the ReadOtherUser property to true. This is the default setting applied to accounts and it is unusual for the setting to be set to false.

I hope, not that if you are reading this and have this problem, this article will help you quickly resolve it! 😊