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

Summary

Throughout this chapter, we have looked at what it means to build a model-driven app. This helps us to understand the importance of getting the data structure right before we really start to build a working app.

The data that we are working with is stored in entities, and those entities have a number of areas that we can use to prebuild components ready for use within our apps. These components are Views, Forms, Charts, and Dashboards. Views allow us to create predefined queries against the list data, Forms allow us to create the input and edit forms for the data, and Charts on Dashboards allow us to provide defined outputs that can be used in a model-driven app—for example, by providing forms to allow the creation of users in the users' entity.

Before you commit yourself to building a model-driven app, you should remember that the only data source that it can connect to is the CDS. As a developer, you should also be aware that you don't have the same freedom...