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

Building the code component for a field

In the previous chapter, we looked at how to initialize a PCF project, and understood the project and manifest file structures. Now, let's use that knowledge and start building the code component for the field type.

In this section, we will be building a field type code component that will count the characters and display the number of characters left out of the maximum characters that the field can accept. Users will have the ability to define the maximum number of characters the field can accept on the configuration page. We will start by initializing a new project.

Initializing a new PCF project for a field

In order to initialize a new PCF project, perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new directory named MyCharacterCounterProject, which will be your working directory for building your component. For example, consider the full path, including the directory you created, as C:\PowerMeUpExamples\MyCharacterCounterProject...