Normally, writing a plug-in is a requirement when working on any Dynamics 365 CE implementation. The number of plug-ins written depends on the complexity of the implementation. In the early days, before the citizen developer era 🙂 , writing a plug-in required .NET knowledge. But now, even citizen developers can write plug-ins without any .NET knowledge and that what we can Low- Code Plug-in.

What is Low – Code Plug-in?

Low – code plug-in is a new way to implement business logic using Power Fx. Although you can’t write complex logic, you can use it for simpler logic that previously required .Net plug-ins to implement. Let’s take an example of Duplicate detection, we know we can design duplicate detection rule in D365 CE which will show a prompt to user in case record failing validation against the duplicate detection rule setup but still user can ignore and save duplicate record. Earlier to order to stop user from creating duplicate record, we used to write .Net code but know we can simply write expression and it won’t let you save record like below:

Where we write low code plug-ins?

Now the next question is where to write these plug-ins right? so the answer is Dataverse Accelerator App, at present, we can write these plug-ins using Dataverse Accelerator App. This is model driven app where we can write instant or event-based plug-ins. Instant plug-ins can be bound or un-bound just like actions in D365 CE whereas event-based plug-ins can be created for Create, Update and Delete. Similar to .Net plug-ins we can be executed pre operation or post operation.

Where they are stored?

Now we know what low-code plug-ins is and where to write them so the next questions where they are stored and how we can deploy them to next Sandbox (They are not ready for the Production yet as this is preview feature at this point). These plug-ins are stored in solution under FxExpression like in below image. Once we are done, we can deploy these to another sandbox using complete solution or patch depending on your environment.

Do you want to see all these in action, you can watch my session on YouTube

Hope it will help someone!!
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