Learning Power Apps Basics
We shall now learn about Power Apps Basics and its usage by app makers, users, admins, developers, and Dynamics 365. The Power Apps are defined as a suite of apps, services, connectors and data platform that offer a rapid application development environment.
Power Apps are used for building –
- Firstly, custom apps for your business needs
- Secondly, for custom business apps which connect to the business data. Such that the business data is stored in the underlying data platform or in various online and on-premises data sources.
Benefits of Using Power Apps
We shall now be discussing the benefits offered by using Power Apps –
- Firstly, the apps built by using Power Apps offer strong business logic and workflow capabilities. These are used for transforming your manual business processes to digital, automated processes.
- Secondly, the apps built using Power Apps offer a responsive design that can run seamlessly in the browser or on mobile devices.
- Also, Power Apps helps to “democratizes” the custom business app building experience
- Fourthly, it enables users to build feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.
- Lastly, it also provides an extensible platform which allows pro developers to interact programmatically with data and metadata. As well as apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.
For App Makers/Creators
By using Power Apps, we can create three types of apps including – canvas, model-driven, and portal. Therefore to create a Power App we start with make.powerapps.com.
- Power Apps Studio: It is the app designer used for creating canvas apps. It helps the creation of apps just like building a slide deck in Microsoft PowerPoint.
- App designer: The App Designer used for model-driven apps helps in defining the sitemap as well as additional components to build a model-driven app.
- Power Apps portals Studio: It is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) design tool used for adding and configuring webpages, components, forms, and lists.
For App Users
The Power apps that have been created either by you or that someone else created or shared you in the browser or on mobile devices
For admins
Power Apps admins allow the use of the Power Platform admin center for creating and managing environments. Also, we get real-time, self-help recommendations and support for Power Apps and Power Automate, and view Dataverse analytics.
For Developers
Power App Developers are primarily app makers proficient to write code for extending business app creation and customization. Some of the uses of the code created by developers include –
- Firstly it is used to create Data and metadata
- Secondly, it is used to apply server-side logic using Azure functions
- Thirdly it is used for plug-ins and workflow extensions
- Next, it is used to apply client-side logic using JavaScript
- Also, it is used to integrate with external data using virtual entities and webhooks
- Lastly, it is used to build custom connectors, and embed apps into your website experiences to create integrated solutions.
Using Power Apps and Dynamics 365
The Dynamics 365 Apps including Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Marketing also use Dataverse, which is an underlying data platform used by Power Apps for storing and securing data. This allows the building of apps using Power Apps and Dataverse directly together with the business data used within Dynamics 365 without integration.
