Understanding PowerApps Web Studio

Introduction

In the earlier article Creating your first PowerApps application, we have seen that how to get started with PowerApps. Now let’s understand what the basic elements of PowerApps studios are.

Building Blocks (Elements) of PowerApps Studio

There are several elements, or we can say building blocks of PowerApps application. These are PowerApps Studio, App Format, Galleries, Forms, Input Controls, Intelligent Controls, Functions, etc.

Let’s see each of the elements in details.

PowerApps studio is the entry point for developing PowerApps applications. Like if we need to build any .NET based application we may need Visual Studio, if we need to build any android application, we may need android studio, similarly, if we need to make PowerApps application, we need to have PowerApps studio.

PowerApps studio is the name given to the PowerApps web interface where you build your PowerApps.

NOTE
THERE IS NO POWERAPPS DESKTOP CLIENT AVAILABLE, SO YOU WON’T BE HAVING ANY DESKTOP APP TO CREATE POWERAPPS APPLICATION.

To open PowerApps studio, open the URL https://www.make.powerapps.com and this will open the PowerApps studio portal.

This is how the PowerApps studio web looks like. Here you have multiple options such as

Home

Clicking on the “Home” link will redirect back to the home page or landing page of the portal.

Learn

Learn will open the learning portal for PowerApps where you can see a lot of text and video articles organized in well manner for us to get started with PowerApps.

It has options such as Articles, Support, community, and Courses.

Courses: Courses will have predefined courses related to various modules of PowerApps.

Articles: Articles will have various articles published by developers

Community: From here you can connect to various PowerApps developers across the world.

Support: Community is always a good place where we can get our queries solved. What you need to do is you need to post your query in the community and community member will provide you the answers. You can always learn allot from other’s query, so you can refer to the community questions to learn more about PowerApps.

Features community topics: From here you can get yourself updated with the latest news and articles. And also, you can take part discussion happening over the world.

Apps

Apps is the place where you will find all your apps and components created into the Portal. From here you can create your new apps too. Import/Export apps options is available here.

Create

Using this option, you can create your new apps into the portal.

Dataverse

Dataverse is a very big data platform on its own. This can be covered in upcoming articles. Using this option in the portal, one can manage the DataVerse entities (Tables), choices (Choice option for choice type columns), Dataflows, Azure Synapse Links, Connections, and also, we can create our own custom connectors if there is no connection available as per our requirement and also we have Gateways, gateways are used when we need to connect our app with On Premises data sources such as on premises SQL, etc.

Flows

Here you can see or create all of your flows that are used or will be used into the PowerApps.

Chatbots

Nowadays, we all know that chatbots are the new ways to provide support for any website. It is replacing the support agents in many ways. So, using Chatbots section, we can create our own chatbots or we can see list of chatbots already created.

AI Builder

From here, we can manage the AI part for our apps. Like we can automate several things using this AI builder, such as we can process our salary slips, resumes, invoices and extract the data from it and save to SharePoint list or any other data sources.

Here we can leverage the existing data models already built and published into our apps or we can create our own data models. This is whole together a separate topic to discuss.

Cards

Cards is something that is integrated into emails or teams as a message and using that one can convey any message to another user, or can take input from the user, or take approval on any item, documents from any other users. There are a lot of use cases with cards. Sample cards look like below

Using Cards option, we can create our own cards, and learn how to create those cards by using learning resources. Also, we can see all the cards that are created.

Solutions

We can define solution as a container that can contains our DataVerse entities, PowerApps, flows and many other things. These solutions can be exported or imported within tenant and other tenants with keeping all the resources together.

There are a lot of solutions pre-built while provisioning the environments.

Summary

In this article, we have explored the basic components/elements in PowerApps Studio and how we can use it with its purposes. If you have any suggestion, you are free to ask into the comment section.