Application Lifecycle Management for PowerApps: Tools

Application Lifecycle Management for PowerApps: Tools

Manual work vs. automation? I am definitely someone who automates as much as possible! For this reason I am always looking for Cmdlet’s or suitable APIs. Most important for me is that I can use these tools and scripts for build automation and application lifecycle management. In Dataverse, my manual work is importing and exporting solutions when I transport my canvas apps between my DEV, TEST, and PROD environments. In addition, I want to store the source code of my…

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Application Lifecycle Management for PowerApps: Solutions

Application Lifecycle Management for PowerApps: Solutions

Once you have started setting up DEV, TEST and PROD environments in Datavers, the next big question arises. How can I transport all my stuff to the next deployment stage? It’s not just my model-driven or canvas apps. I have to take care of their dependencies as well, of course. There are all my used cloud flows, custom connectors, Dataverse tables and much more. In the beginning, as a citizen developer, I transferred every part manually. This means, I exported…

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API Design for PowerApps @ Azure Developer Community Day 2021

API Design for PowerApps @ Azure Developer Community Day 2021

Power Apps are amazing! Any Citizen Developer can digitalise fantastic processes if they have the APIs they need. In my session, I show Pro-Developers tricks for providing missing APIs in Azure. Azure Logic Apps, for example, help me to setup quickly and with almost with no code such missing APIs. But the complexity increases mostly during development. A single Azure Logic App suddenly grows into 10 or 20. As a consequence, my Power App has 20 custom connectors. This is…

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Components in Canvas Apps @ Deutschland Powerthon 2021

Components in Canvas Apps @ Deutschland Powerthon 2021

Components are a fantastic asset for Citizen and Pro Developers. In my session, I’ll show how I use this feature to reduce the complexity of my canvas apps. I provide insight into defining properties and event triggers to encapsulate UI elements. Another highlight of this technology is the use of function components as reusable and central code building blocks. You have missed my session? No problem here is the recording from Deutschland Powerthon 2021, 2nd November 2021 (GERMAN only):

Power Apps – Named Record in a Gallery

Power Apps – Named Record in a Gallery

One of my personal highlights this week and the reason I always say #NeverStopLearning: I discovered how to create a named record for a gallery control in my Canvas App. You might say: why should I need this, you can use the ThisItem operator to access the record. And yes, you are right. This is a common solution for child controls in a gallery. I can set up my child controls and connect them to the data. To do this,…

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Application Lifecycle Management for PowerApps: Environments

Application Lifecycle Management for PowerApps: Environments

My journey with Dataverse started as citizen developer. I discovered this funny new environment and used canvas apps for cool & portable demos. After a while, my demos, prototypes, and tiny apps became a productive status and started to grow. I think each of us knows these problems and the resulting questions. I faced new challenges: How can I maintain my apps and how can I continue adding new features? Furthermore, how can I stop breaking existing features? Well, the…

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Enhanced Component Properties

Enhanced Component Properties

Ohh what should I say? Whether you are Citizen or Pro developer, you should check this out!!! I love the new experimental feature in power apps for canvas apps components! “Enhanced Component Properties” opens up a total new way of development. Before I get too excited, let me give you some background. Canvas apps components were introduced as reusable building blocks approx. 1 or 2 years ago. I can add controls to my canvas app component and layout them separately….

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Power Apps – Error Handling for APIs

Power Apps – Error Handling for APIs

Custom Connectors and APIs are a pleasure for Power Apps. I can access my needed data, the setup is very fast, and finally I can use the methods of my connector from my Power App. This works fine, except when my API call fails. How can I handle such errors in my PowerApps? Is there something like a Try-Catch-Block? To be honest, it took me a while to find a setup that works for me. So let me first explain…

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PowerApps – Order by Version Number

PowerApps – Order by Version Number

You know those days when you get stuck on a simple problem? When I recently extended one of our COSMO CONSULT Canvas Apps for our Self Service Management, I had such a day – such a problem: My custom connector to my API provided a list of Azure DevOps Artifacts. Nothing very special, just a list of records. Each record had the app name, version and its URL. You can see an example collection in the following snippet, assigned to…

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