Book Image

Learn Microsoft PowerApps

By : Matthew Weston
Book Image

Learn Microsoft PowerApps

By: Matthew Weston

Overview of this book

Microsoft PowerApps provides a modern approach to building business applications for mobile, tablet, and browser. Learn Microsoft PowerApps will guide you in creating powerful and productive apps that will add value to your organization by helping you transform old and inefficient processes and workflows. Starting with an introduction to PowerApps, this book will help you set up and configure your first application. You’ll explore a variety of built-in templates and understand the key difference between types of applications such as canvas and model-driven apps, which are used to create apps for specific business scenarios. In addition to this, you’ll learn how to generate and integrate apps directly with SharePoint, and gain an understanding of PowerApps key components such as connectors and formulas. As you advance, you’ll be able to use various controls and data sources, including technologies such as GPS, and combine them to create an iterative app. Finally, the book will help you understand how PowerApps can use several Microsoft Power Automate and Azure functionalities to improve your applications. By the end of this PowerApps book, you’ll be ready to confidently develop lightweight business applications with minimal code.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Getting Started with PowerApps
6
Section 2: Developing Your PowerApp
11
Section 3: Extending the Capabilities of Your PowerApp
18
Section 4: Working with Model-Driven Apps
21
Section 5: Governing PowerApps

Understanding the CDM

The CDM is a standard collection of commonly used data collections and activities across the Microsoft business and productivity applications. We can compare them to common database schemas such as users, addresses, and more. The CDM, just like a database, is made up of several key elements such as entities, attributes, and relationships. Relationships are particularly important for reducing the amount of data duplication and being able to reference data from one entity to another.

Entities, as we mentioned earlier, are ways of classifying data and providing metadata about that data, essentially building up the model that our data will follow. To do this, we need to access the PowerApps portal and select Entities again from the Data menu on the left side of the screen.

First, let's start by introducing entities.

Introducing entities

When you first access the Entities screen, you will notice that the database has already been populated with several examples...