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

Creating and interacting with collections

Collections are one of the most common methods for storing data locally within your PowerApp, and once you start developing, you will find that they are extremely useful in a number of different ways. They can be built dynamically while you're running your app, as well as when your app loads. This means you could use it to retrieve data from a data source and store it locally so that it can be manipulated before being written back. In this chapter, we are going to use collections to build data that we can then interact with using our output controls, galleries, and tables.

A collection can be compared to a table, where you have a number of rows of data with each attribute being expressed as a column. Collections can store arrays of data within them, so they're slightly more complex than just a simple data table, but the premise is the same.

Filling collections

When you're filling in a collection, you can do two different things...