Preface

Power Apps is a low-code platform for building applications from Microsoft. With this platform, you can create solutions to your business needs while integrating with other components of the Power Platform, such as Power Automate and Power BI.

Quite different from the complete online documentation, you will find that this is not your regular reference book. Instead, this book exposes real-world scenarios and experiences to help you get a headstart in your Power Apps projects.

By exploring a carefully selected collection of chapters, you will delve into various aspects of Power Apps. This includes learning the fundamentals of creating canvas apps, designing model-driven solutions, enhancing apps with custom connectors, and integrating with other platforms. You will also gain insight into the pro-developer aspects, such as the Power Apps Component Framework and developing website experiences for external users with Power Pages.

Who this book is for

Since we cover practical use cases, basic knowledge of building applications using Power Apps is required to take advantage of the solutions explored in this book. You will get a step-by-step tutorial on building the recipes crafted for each chapter.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, App Maker Basics, serves as the base instructions for building the subsequent recipes. Instead of repeating these steps in each recipe, we concentrate them in to one chapter for tasks such as creating a Dataverse solution or building a SharePoint list.

Chapter 2, Building Pixel-Perfect Solutions with Canvas Apps, starts with the best practices for building canvas apps and continues with creating sample solutions, including coverage of the data source handling.

Chapter 3, Building from Data with Model-Driven Apps, continues our journey by following a collection of recipes joined together to create an all-around help desk solution. We will also explore the Entity Relationship Diagram capabilities from the maker Copilot in Power Apps.

Chapter 4, Choosing the Right Data Source for your Applications, will help you to make a sound decision when determining the data source of your applications. This chapter also explains the importance of the licensing model on this platform.

Chapter 5, Automating Processes with Power Automate, focuses on several use cases, from inside and outside the Microsoft ecosystem, to improve business processes using this component of the Power Platform.

Chapter 6, Extending the Platform, builds upon the concept of enhancing the application-building process by using components. We will also learn how to extend the platform by creating custom connectors, using geospatial capabilities, and integrating mixed reality.

Chapter 7, Improving User Experience, looks at how to enrich your user interfaces to make your applications more appealing to end users. This chapter will also cover how to create a responsive application using the latest techniques available in Power Apps.

Chapter 8, Power Apps Everywhere, explains all the possible ways to use and integrate Power Apps on many platforms, from mobile device consumption to embedding scenarios on SharePoint and Power BI, without forgetting the latest on Microsoft Teams development, including Dataverse for Teams.

Chapter 9, Empowering Your Applications with AI Builder, focuses on using AI Builder solutions to improve our applications and processes by bringing artificial intelligence into the mix, including Copilot.

Chapter 10, Discovering the Power Platform Admin Center, is about learning how to manage the Power Platform using the tools and settings available in this admin center.

Chapter 11, Tips, Tricks, and Workarounds, offers a collection of hints from the application-building experience in Power Apps with a set of topics that will help solve or improve a wide variety of scenarios.

Chapter 12, Advanced Techniques with Power Apps Component Framework, tackles the pro-developer side by building a Power Apps Component Framework component from scratch. We will look at setting up our development environment, deploying the component to an environment, and using it on a canvas app.

Chapter 13, Reaching Beyond the Organization with Power Pages, introduces the Power Pages component. It offers a solution to allow external users to interact with our Dataverse data. This chapter will extend the help desk solution built in previous chapters.

To get the most out of this book

Before diving into building solutions with Power Apps, you are going to need a Microsoft 365 subscription.

You might have one already from your organization, but if you want to have a playground to build apps, I'm going to give you two suggestions:

• Microsoft 365 Developer Program

This program allows you to have a Microsoft 365 subscription with many features available: 25 E5 user licenses, apps such as SharePoint, learning resources, and more. It's the perfect sandbox environment to create your apps, not only to build Power Apps but also to learn other technologies from the whole Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This subscription renews automatically every three months as long as you actively use it.

To get more information, please refer to https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program.

• Power Apps Developer Plan

This option is ideal if you want a more focused approach to the Power Platform. It offers a free environment for individual use with the same advantages as a paid plan, including premium connectors. However, some restrictions exist, such as app sharing and the need for a Microsoft organizational account.

This subscription has no renewal process; it's perpetual. For more information, please visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-apps/free.

Power Platform licensing requirements

Power Apps paid plans

The licensing model on this platform depends on the type of connector needed for your data sources. Standard connectors, such as the one used for SharePoint, don't require an additional license besides Microsoft 365, but premium or custom connectors do require a Power Apps license:

• Per app plan

Allows running one app (canvas or model-driven) or portal per user.

• Per user plan

Allows building and using unlimited apps and portals (within service limits).

• Pay-as-you-go plan

Allows a per user plan that charges for the number of apps or portals runs by a user each month (note that this plan requires an Azure subscription).

To get more insight into the licensing model, please visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-apps/pricing/.

Power Automate paid plans

In Power Automate, three licensing plans allow access to data using premium connectors, custom connectors, and on-premises data. The difference lies in the capacity of these plans and who will be the end-user of them:

• There are two user plans: the Power Automate Premium and the Power Automate Hosted Process. Both let you create unlimited flows, including AI builder service credits, but the latter adds unattended robotic process automation in a hosted virtual machine.
• On the other hand, the Power Automate Process licenses a bot that runs unattended robotic process automation.

Using either of these options depends entirely on the analysis of the business process that requires automation. For detailed information about the pricing of these plans, please refer to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-automate/pricing.

Download the example code files

The code bundle for the book is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Microsoft-Power-Apps-Cookbook-Third-Edition. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file with color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/gbp/9781835465158.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, and user input. Here is an example: "Repeat step 9 for the Ticket Priority column, using the following choices: Low, Medium, and High."

A block of code is set as follows:

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words you see onscreen. For example, words...