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

Understanding the component life cycle

The framework invokes different methods described in the previous section at different life cycle stages, and it is crucial to know when these methods will be invoked and how they interact with the host. The host here can be either model-driven or a canvas app, which will contain the component.

Page load

When the page loads, the component invokes the constructor defined in the manifest file. This will create an object for the application to use. When the page is ready, it initializes the component by calling the init() method with a set of parameters:

init(context: ComponentFramework.Context<IInputs>, notifyOutputChanged: () => void, state: ComponentFramework.Dictionary, container:HTMLDivElement)

Data changes by the user

When the page loads, the component displays the data until the user interacts with the component to change the data. Once this occurs, you must call the notifyOutputChanged...