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The Best Practices in Building a Power Apps Canvas.

  • The current buzz is to create a modern workplace and this modern workplace concept is no longer tied to large organizations.

  • Some startup even begins creating their business completely on the cloud.

  • Business owners and organizations are not only modernizing their business to seek positive change but also to use the benefits of our digital age.


Factoring the pandemic, more and more businesses recognize that the way of the future is through digital collaboration, technology, and productivity tools.

Among the productivity tools introduced by Microsoft is Power Apps.

The idea behind power apps is to build moderns apps with the capability to work with the current organization’s system and database without having to hire professionally trained software developers.



1.) What are Power Apps?

  • Power Apps is a part of the Microsoft Power Platform.

  • Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors, and data platforms that provides a rapid application development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.

  • The main functionality of this tool is to enable its user to quickly build custom business apps that connect to the business data stored either in the underlying data platform or in various online and on-premises data sources.





2.) What are Canvas Apps?

As shown on the figure above, a canvas apps where user design its interface by drag and drop the component made available in Power Apps to any formation that it wishes to without be writing code in a traditional programming language such as C#.





3.) The best practices you should consider when building canvas apps.

3.1.) Assigning or naming a common prefix for the variable.

  • Provide a name to the variable may seems like an obvious or trial steps to do.

  • However, if another developer is assigned to maintain the apps or wanted to use the created variable as a template for another apps, a proper naming or a common prefix can help a lot in the apps building and maintaining process.

  • You can choose beforehand a common prefix such as “loc” or “lcl” for local items that will be available for the current screen and “glo” or “gbl” for variable that is accessible across to the whole application.

By settings these patterns from the beginning of your project, it will be a great help to organize and ease the communication between the developers.




3.2) Limit the number of controls.

  • One of the vital elements of an application’s success is performance. If an application is slow to start or takes several seconds to perform a task, it hurts user adoption.

  • To avoid rendered screen or slowdown in your apps, you need to learn the performance points of your platform.

  • In Power Apps, one of the main recommendations for improving responsiveness is to reduce the number of controls.

  • Power Apps generates an HTML document object model to render each control. The more controls you add, the more generation time Power Apps needs.

  • You can, in some cases, achieve the same result and have the app start faster if you use a gallery instead of individual controls.

  • In addition, you might want to reduce the number of control types on the same screen.




    3.3) Republish apps regularly.
  • Another best practices that able to improve your apps performance is to regularly publish your apps.

  • As the Power Apps platform is continuously optimized and deployed, your app is regenerated within the latest platform optimizations when you republish it.




    Conclusion

    To summarize, when it comes to using Power Apps to get things done and keep people informed, your options are nearly limitless. 

    Instead of traditional paper notes to run your business, use or create an app using the Power Apps. One of the business solutions that you could apply is to create a human resource (HR) app where employees could insert their work schedules and vacation requests.

    This will allow HR to record the same information, anywhere, anytime. You could also include a notification or send reminders for the start of the next day’s shift.


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