DEV Community: Ishan Sheikh

How to add Google Analytics in Power Pages

Ishan Sheikh — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 05:30:45 +0000

Adding Google Analytics to Power Pages is essential for tracking user engagement, behavior, and conversion paths. While the most common method is using the Header or Footer web templates, a lesser-known but efficient method is adding the script in the Head/Bottom content snippet. This approach is simpler, avoids template modifications, and offers more flexibility for inserting global scripts.

The Head/Bottom snippet is rendered just before the closing </head> tag, which is the recommended placement for analytics scripts like Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager.

To add the Google Analytics script, navigate to Content Snippets and create a new snippet named Head/Bottom.

Select the type as HTML.

Leave the Content snippet language blank to apply across all languages.

Once added, the script will load across all pages, ensuring consistent tracking without additional customization.

Working with DatePicker in Power Pages

Ishan Sheikh — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 05:52:00 +0000

Power Pages uses the Bootstrap DateTimePicker library to render date and time fields on forms. This library offers a wide range of methods to customize and control the behavior of the date picker widget.

To programmatically interact with the date picker, you can use jQuery to retrieve the DateTimePicker object associated with a specific field.

Use the following code to get the instance of the date picker object.

$("#field_id").next().data("DateTimePicker")

Here, field_id is the schema name of the field.

Once you have the DateTimePicker object, you can easily apply various configurations. For example, to disable future dates from the date picker widget use the following code –

$("#field_id").next().data("DateTimePicker").maxDate(moment())

You can also set specific date ranges to select. For example, to limit the date picker to only allow selecting dates within 7 days before and after today, creating a 14-day selectable range.

var datePicker = $("#field_id").next().data("DateTimePicker")
datePicker.minDate(moment().subtract(7, 'days'))
datePicker.maxDate(moment().add(7, 'days'))

As you can see in the image below, only dates within 7 days before and after 16th May are selectable.

You can refer to the official Bootstrap DateTimePicker documentation for a complete list of methods and customization options.

Standard vs Enhanced Data Models in Power Pages

Ishan Sheikh — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 05:46:23 +0000

Introduction

The data model in Power Pages determines how website metadata and configurations are stored and managed in Microsoft Dataverse. The enhanced data model overcomes the limitations of the standard data model. It represents a significant architectural shift in Power Pages. In this blog, we’ll explore the key differences between these two models.

Standard Data Model

Since the earliest versions of Power Pages (formerly portals), website metadata and configurations have been stored in custom tables, much like standard CRM records.These tables typically use the adx_ prefix.

Provisioning a site using the standard data model involves installing multiple solution packages and creating custom tables, making the process time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Additionally, ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) is very complex as configurations are not inherently solution-aware and must be handled separately from other Power Platform components. This often results in challenges when moving solutions across environments or applying updates.

However, the limitations are not much noticed at the client end.

Enhanced Data Model

To address the limitations of the standard data model, Microsoft introduced the enhanced data model in 2023.

This model leverages the combination of system tables, non-configuration entities, and virtual tables, eliminating the need to install additional packages and speeding up the provisioning of new sites.

The metadata in the enhanced model is stored in system tables like powerpagesite, powerpagecomponent, and powerpagesitelanguage, while the configuration data resides in virtual tables with mspp_ prefix. These tables cannot be modified.

The enhanced data model also provides a better experience with the Design Studio.

Since the tables are solution-aware, configurations can be packaged and deployed across environments seamlessly, enabling a smoother ALM process.

Key Differences Between the Standard and Enhanced Data Models

Aspect	Standard Data Model	Enhanced Data Model
Data storage	Custom tables with `adx_` prefix	System, non-configuration, and virtual tables with `mspp_` prefix
Performance	Slower performance in some scenarios due to the overhead of numerous custom tables	Offers faster performance and a more responsive design studio experience
Provisioning	Slower since it involves creating multiple tables	Can be contained in a solution, hence a smooth deployment process
Solution Awareness	Not solution aware, not possible to deploy with solutions	Can be contained in a solution, hence smooth deployment process
ALM support	Can be complex due to reliance on the custom tables	Great, since it is solution-aware and allows deployment using the Power Apps solutions
Updates	Manual application of package updates, which can be time-consuming	Smoother and more efficient updates

Determining the model version of the portal

To determine the model version of your existing portal, navigate to the Power Platform Admin Center and open your portal details.

In the Site Details section, you can find the data model of your current portal site as seen below.

Disabling enhanced data model

By default, any new Power Pages portal created will use the enhanced data model.

However, you can disable it from the Power Platform admin center.

Navigate to Environments > Your environment > Power Pages sites.

At the top, you will see a switch to enable or disable the enhanced data model. Use this option to disable the enhanced data model.

Disabling the enhanced data model will not affect any existing sites you have in your environment. Only the new sites created will now have the standard data model.

Migrating from standard to enhanced data model

Microsoft provides functionality in the Power Apps CLI tool to migrate from standard to enhanced data model as documented here.

However, at the time of writing this article, the feature is in preview and should not be used in production sites.

As of now, Microsoft has not announced any plans to deprecate the standard data model. Therefore, I would recommend keeping your older sites to use the standard data model and only use the enhanced model for newer sites.

That said, the limitations of the Standard model do not impact the client-side experience, so existing sites can continue to function effectively without immediate changes.

Summary

The Enhanced Data Model marks a major improvement over the Standard model, moving away from numerous custom tables to a more efficient structure, leveraging system and virtual tables. This results in faster provisioning, improved performance, better ALM capabilities, and streamlined updates.