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Category: Power Apps

An Intro to Power Apps

Published 2024-10-29 by Kevin Feasel

Vikash Kumar has a two-parter. First up is an introduction to Power Apps:

Microsoft PowerApps is a tool within the Microsoft Power Platform suite that enables users to create custom apps without extensive coding knowledge. It’s a low-code platform that empowers both technical and non-technical users to build apps quickly. Whether you’re looking to automate business processes or solve specific problems, PowerApps provides the tools you need.

Next is a primer on Canvas Apps in Power Apps:

Canvas Apps are applications where you start with a blank canvas and design the user interface from scratch. You have complete control over the layout, appearance, and functionality of the app by dragging and dropping components onto the canvas. This makes Canvas Apps ideal for creating custom apps that match your specific design and workflow requirements.

Power Apps is something I’ve never really gotten into. I don’t think it’s extremely intuitive, which can be a drawback in a tool whose primary audience is non-developers.

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Updating Microsoft Fabric Warehouses via Power Apps

Published 2024-10-28 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson troubleshoots an issue:

One of my recent explorations with Microsoft Fabric was integrating Power Apps with a Fabric Warehouse—both in a standalone Power Apps app and as an embedded visual within a Power BI report to enable writeback. My goal was simple: to enable Power Apps to display and update records from a table in the Fabric Warehouse. Initially, I turned to the three-screen template apps to get started, however; while it displayed the records, it failed to update them. This led me to dive deeper into how Fabric Warehouse differs from other SQL data sources when it comes to Power Apps and to find a workaround.

Read on to see how it all works.

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SQL Server Connection Strings and Power Apps

Published 2024-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin works through a pain point in Power Apps:

Power Platform is part of the Microsoft universe of products, for lack of a better phrase. But the one thing I find interesting is that the default connectors for data in the PowerPlatform sphere is Dataverse or Sharepoint. At least, when I see people talking about PowerApps is you’re connecting to one of those two connectors for your data. (Fun fact, PowerApps solutions use Dataverse to store configurations.) One would think that SQL Server database, wherever it may live Azure or on prem, would be part of that combination, but it’s actually considered a Premium connector.

I’ve mentioned that the PowerApp I’m building is using data in a SQL Server database. This matters because the type of connector you use makes a difference as you move apps from one environment to another.

Read on for more information around environment variables, why they won’t work, and one alternative solution.

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Issues around Power Apps in Source Control

Published 2024-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin continues a series on Power Apps:

As a developer, I have two things I have to do: 1. Check code into source control and 2. Make sure I can use that code to deploy to any and all environments repeatably and successfully. The question then becomes, how do you do this when the development environment is in a portal?

Read on for the answer, as well as a tricky situation you might run into along the way.

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Deploying Power Apps as Solutions or Apps

Published 2024-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin explains deployment:

One of the big challenges I had was how to move the app from different environments. Following best software development practices, we have a development environment in our Power Platform that uses a development database as well as a production environment that points to a different production database. This has been a multi-step process with hurdles along the way.

Read on for Deborah’s thoughts and some of the issues she hit along the way.

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Recursive Flows in Power Automate

Published 2022-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Imke Feldmann starts a new series:

If you want to traverse organisational hierarchies, walk through nested folder structures or create nested Power BI metrics from an Excel table for example, you need some sort of recursive logic. In this article I will introduce you to the basic method of recursive flows in Power Automate. In upcoming articles I will share some of the flows for the above mentioned use cases.

Read on for an intuitive understanding of what recursion is as well as how you can implement it in a Power Automate flow.

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Power Apps Building Blocks

Published 2022-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Elayne Jones gives us an introduction to Power Apps:

The starting point for working with Power Apps is an environment. Environments house your business’ apps, data, chatbots, and flows. By building apps in a single environment, users can isolate content aimed at a specific use case or target their content towards a specific team or department. A common practice is to build separate environments for Development, Test, and Production stages. Power Apps Environments can even connect to GitHub, streamlining source control within an organization.

An Azure Active Directory tenant is required to create an environment, and only users within that tenant can access the content within the environment. After the environment is created, users deploy data sources to that environment. Thereafter, the content created can only connect to the data sources within the same environment. You can create a database in each environment, but there can only be one database in each environment.

Read on for a lot more.

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An Overview of Azure Logic Apps

Published 2021-10-29 by Kevin Feasel

Elayne Jones takes us through the use case for Azure Logic Apps:

Relying on automated workflows, instead of human intervention, ensures data consistency and availability. Automated workflows are, therefore, an integral piece of a sophisticated Modern Data Platform. Now, thanks to Azure Logic Apps, creating a complex workflow is no longer a daunting technical challenge!

Read on to see how they work, what kinds of connectors are available, and the sorts of things you can build with it.

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Displaying Blob Storage-Based Images in Power Apps

Published 2021-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Paulina Nowinska has a tutorial for us:

Today, I explain how to create a simple app in Microsoft Power Apps where:

– the data are located in Excel,

– the table contains the path to the images from public Azure Blob Storage,

– the app displays images directly from Blob Storage based on the path defined in the database (Excel file).

If you haven’t used Power Apps before, I recommend checking it out. It’s not perfectly intuitive, but it does offer a much lower-code experience than classic app development.

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