Why PowerApps?

Having had the opportunity to work with the development and delivery of PowerApps applications on different projects, I feel that this technology provides a great modern solution to fill in business technology gaps, be a companion to software-as-a-service models and serve as an integrated frontend to various enterprise architectures.

Uses of PowerApps

Through PowerApps application, a user or business could now be presented with a simple and user-friendly, user interface to input or maintain data in different modes and for various reasons. Such applications can be designed to be used on mobile, tablet or desktops.
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PowerApps is another tool in the powerful Microsoft Power Platform. Most of us already had the chance to experience the benefits of Power BI within the reporting, dashboard and data visualization spectrum. When building reports through Power BI, it is normally essential to use Power Query to cleanse, standardize and prepare the data to a reportable state prior to modelling it and consequently start the development of the report. The effort required in this stage varies depending on the state and consistency of the dataset or database that is to be used to build the reports. And another benefit of PowerApps could be highly experienced at this stage.

PowerApps could help in ensuring that data is kept in a consistent, organized and meaningful way, as opposed to leaving data entry validation at the stake of the user and applying endless data cleansing and preparation phases after its commitment. This will hence be also beneficial to any other data architecture like Data Warehouses. To highlight another benefit of PowerApps, building an application with this technology takes much less time then if coding such an application through managed coding languages. Likewise, I would say it also replaces the need to develop through VBA in Excel – by presenting a more scalable, modern and intuitive alternative.

In this blog I am going to particularly focus on connections to data sources within PowerApps from a general perspective.

Data sources

PowerApps allows the connection to multiple data sources and APIs. It can hence serve as a common handler of the data in different systems being used simultaneously within an organization.

In order to include a data source in your application, the following few clicks are needed:

1) Just go to View on the top ribbon

2) Then click Data sources
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3) A column will show on the right, where the New Connection button can be used to add the required data source.

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4) And voila! There’s a whole list of connections to choose from, which range from other Microsoft products like Azure and Dynamics 365 to others like Google Calendar; social media favourites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook; Marketing automation platforms like MailChimp; CRMs like Salesforce; Zendesk and so on.

Once the login details for the connection are added, that data source could be used in the PowerApp solution in many ways as a data source, data processor or as a data destination.

It is worth keeping in mind that some API connectors might only be available in Premium (which thus relies on the price tier/ under the plan that you are on). Such connectors are clearly identifiable with a gem icon beside them in the list.

Some other connectors have a bulb icon beside them. This just shows that the feature is in experimental or preview. This serves as a warning to the developers when designing and developing their solutions, that such connectors are still subject to change and to be cautious when basing their system on them.

Some connectors might also require some other details during development to activate their usage within the application, ranging from login details to Azure Keys etc. Yet once the application is published these connectors are treated as part of the application and any user granted access to the application will inherit the right to use these connectors as part of the application itself (without the need for her/him to have a relevant account for each and every connector). Upon loading the application the first time, the users will be prompted by a one-time message to have access to the connectors within:

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Once “Allow” is clicked, the users will be able to use as part of the application itself (with no other access outside the application being affected).

Azure services with PowerApps

When acting as a frontend to Azure services, PowerApps can provide a cloud-hosted scalable solution facilitating the operation which might have otherwise required technical expertise.

Just an example of this, Cognitive Services within Azure offers different AI solution that can be put in practice on a business level. Face API is one of these services, that can be used as a face verification and detection whilst integrating emotion recognition. Thus, by adding Face API as a data source in PowerApps (along with some other technologies like Microsoft Flow) one can easily provide a front end to take a person’s face image, have buttons included that trigger the analysis of those images through Face API and Microsoft Flow. Additionally, the results can be retained immediately and displayed in the same PowerApps solution. Azure Storage could also be added as part of the flow processes in order to retain a copy of the analyzed pictures – if required.

This applies for the utilization of other Azure service in conjunction with PowerApps.

The fact that PowerApps allows ease of input through Camera, Barcode Scanner and Microphone, it makes this technology versatile in data inputting methods and user interface adaptations. It hence also allows the opportunity to utilize the wide breadth of Azure Services that correspond with these data input methods.

To sum up, this gives some ideas of PowerApps usage and an example of some applications that can be developed through PowerApps. It is also worth noting that PowerApps allows also the connection to custom APIs that have been produced through tailor-made development. Hence in these cases it will also serve as a potential front-end especially in cases where expertise in technical languages used in UI is lacking.