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Creating Common Portal Customizations
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Difficulty
Beginner
Duration
45m
Students
1241
Ratings
5/5
Description

Microsoft Power Apps is a low-code/no-code solution that allows professional developers and non-IT professionals to create powerful applications much faster than with regularly developed applications. In this course, we will look at the core capabilities of Power Apps and how they help businesses automate and enhance repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming tasks.

We will cover canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals, as well as their use cases and the differences between them. We'll also walk you through how to build each one. Finally, we'll take a look at the Power Apps Component Framework and how this allows developers to add even more functionality to standard Power Apps.

Learning Objectives

  • Get a foundational understanding of canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals, including their use cases and features
  • Use data sources, controls, and formulas to build, share, and publish your own canvas apps
  • Plan, build, share, and publish model-driven apps
  • Create and customize your own portal and monitor user behavior on your portal
  • Learn about the Power Apps Framework and how it can enhance the user experience of your apps

Intended Audience

This course is intended for both IT professionals and non-technical professionals looking to automate and enhance business processes for mobile and desktop users.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course but any computer coding knowledge and even basic Excel knowledge would be beneficial when learning about Power Apps.

Transcript

When building a portal, it's important to know that portals have a similar build process as model driven apps. Meaning you should set up your data structure in data Dataverse as well as any forms and views you will be using before you build your portal. Let's start with customizing our menu header. To change the pages that are displayed in our header, we can go to the pages icon. And if I click on the ellipses on the about us page, I can have options such as adding a child page, moving it up or down, making it a sub page or delete this page.

Let's now try adding a new page. I'll select the new page dropdown and select a fixed layout called page with title. I can rename this page to My Appointments and now I can add a few components. Selecting the components icon, you can see that I have a good amount of options here. I can add the layout components to divide my content into sections. I can also add text, images, iframes, forms, lists, breadcrumbs, and even integrate Power BI.

Let's try adding a list, once added, I can give it a name. I'll say My Appointments. For our Dataverse data table, I'll select appointment. For the view let's choose the My Appointments view. I now have the options to include a button to create a new record, view details, edit a record or delete a record. If I select create new record, I will also need to select the target type. I'll select web page so that the user will be taken to another webpage in my portal to create a new record. To do this though, I'll need to add a New Appointment page and put a form on it. This time I'll select blank page. Let's rename it to New Appointment, and now I'll add my form and connect it to the appointment table. I'll name it, New Appointment. Select the appointment table and select appointment for the form layout. I'll leave the mode set to insert since we're adding a new record.

Let's go back to our, My Appointments page. Now when creating a new record, I can see it go to our New Appointment page. And that's it. In the next lecture we'll go over identifying differences in portal behavior based on user authentication.

About the Author

Ben is a Power Apps and Power Automate Specialist for Sovereign SP and has been using Power Apps, Power Automate, and SharePoint since 2017. Since then, he has built 100+ solutions using these amazing Microsoft tools. He loves helping others realize what technology can do and how it helps automate and enhance business processes. Most of all, though, he loves how these tools help make people’s jobs easier. The phrase, “This will make things so much easier!” is why he's in the IT business.

Ben Fetters lives in South Ogden, Utah, with his amazing wife and brand-new baby girl. A Weber State University Business Administration graduate, he loves to create businesses and help current businesses improve.