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

Working with dates

PowerApps provides many functions to help us with dates in several different ways. The most basic functions start with how to actually get the current date or date-time. The date or time is displayed when the function is called. So, if you use either the Now or Today functions on a screen deep within your app, you won't get the date-time stamp until the user navigates to that screen.

The first function is Now(), which will return the current date and time. This function, unlike most we have already seen in this chapter, has an empty argument list, therefore you just need to call the function to get the result:

Now()

This function will return a value that is formatted in the ShortDateTime24 format. We will explore date formatting later in this section:

Figure 6.13: Getting the current date and time

The second function, Today, will simply return the current date in ShortDate format:

Today()

Again, there are no arguments related to this function. Let's look...