Book Image

Extending Microsoft Power Apps with Power Apps Component Framework

By : Danish Naglekar
Book Image

Extending Microsoft Power Apps with Power Apps Component Framework

By: Danish Naglekar

Overview of this book

Power Apps Component Framework is used by professional developers to extend the capabilities of model-driven and canvas apps. Extending Microsoft Power Apps with Power Apps Component Framework will take you through the basic as well as advanced topics using practical examples. The book starts by helping you understand the fundamentals of the framework, its lifecycle, and the tools that you'll use to build code components using best practices and file management guidelines. You'll then learn how to extend Power Apps step by step and apply the principles and concepts covered in the book to build code components for field type attributes. The book covers different ways of debugging code components and guides you through the process of building code components for datasets. You'll also explore the functions and methods provided by the framework to enhance your controls using powerful sets of libraries and extensions. As you advance, you'll get to grips with creating and managing authentication profiles, discover different ways of deploying code components, and configure code components in model-driven and canvas apps. Finally, you'll learn some of the important features of the framework and learn modern web development practices. By the end of this Power Apps book, you'll be able to build, debug, enrich, and deploy code components confidently.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals of the Power Apps Component Framework
6
Section 2: Building and Managing Code Components
12
Section 3: Enhancing Code Components and Your Development Experience

Exploring the index.ts file

Once you have initialized your PCF project you can find an index.ts file in your control folder, as we discussed in the Getting to know the files and the folder structure section. This file will have four functions already defined for you, along with an empty constructor. Let's go over the importance of these four functions.

The init function

This is the first function that gets invoked when the control is loaded and is never invoked again until the control is reloaded. For example, when you navigate between records, the control is reloaded. This function can be used to initialize a control's UI. You can also invoke remote server calls and any other initialization that needs to happen when your controls load.

It has four parameters:

  • context: This is the most important object provided by the framework that gives us access to all the properties and methods that are available in the Power Apps component framework. It also contains...