In our Power Pages project, we need to set up a Knowledge Article search. Our customer has Dynamics 365 Customer Service licenses. If you are unfamiliar with the Knowledge Article concept, here is a reading for you: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-service/use/customer-service-hub-user-guide-knowledge-article
To human-summarise, knowledge management is a module inside the Dynamics 365 Customer Service module. It requires a configuration. It’s very powerful with the approval and version control, categories etc. In our case, we hoped it would help our support team to maintain the live part of the website more effectively. We hope they can manage the content of the articles within the app without interfering with the dev team’s continuous development.
In the Power Pages design studio, templates are available for Dynamics 365 modules (marked with Dynamics 365 tags). These templates are preconfigured to have some features work OOTB. One of these features is a search. We are particularly interested in the knowledge article search.
After the setup, it doesn’t look too bad. It actually looks pretty good.
And you can search the knowledge base for the information. The search page looks like on the screenshot below.
By clicking on the link in the results, you will be directed to the detail page. Note that it has its own breadcrumbs, and in the browser address bar, the page URL looks custom.
Everything looks great, though. So what’s the problem? The problem is that all Dynamics 365-specific website templates are only available for websites on the Standard data model.
The Enhanced data model templates are not supported yet. Why is it bad? Because our customer website uses the Enhanced data model.
So what’s next?
The short answer: we need to configure it the same way we do for custom tables. The steps are described here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/configure/search/additional-tables
It’s a great step-by-step article. The only thing: here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-pages/configure/search/additional-tables#site-marker-for-record-details-page
DONT’T
Your site marker will be: knowledgearticle_SearchResultPage.
As your configuration is custom (no screenshots pass by this point, as it’s only configured at the customer), your search behaviour will be slightly different. And no custom-looking KB article URLs. But it’s OK.
Another great news: you can actually customise the results’ look and feel. But I will save it for another article.
To sum up, to configure the Knowledge Article search for the Enhanced data model website, treat the Knowledge Article table as a custom search table.