What’s new: Power Apps August 2022 Feature Update
Welcome to the Power Apps monthly feature update! We will use this blog to share a summary of product, community, and learning updates from throughout the month so you can access it in one easy place. A variety of new and highly anticipated features are now available which we are very excited to share:
- Build apps across multiple tenants with Azure B2B maker
- Improved Canvas App monitoring with Experimental Application Insights Features
- ESLint rules for Power Apps and Dynamics 365
- Creating canvas apps as Dataverse solutions by default
- Table designer now in preview in the canvas and model-driven app designers
- Automatically create a Power App from a REST API
- Modern command bar in Canvas
- Install Apps via Power Platform CLI & Install API
Trust
Build apps across multiple tenants with Azure B2B maker
With the new Power Apps B2B maker preview, working across subsidiaries and partners is easier. Makers can now build apps as a guest in another tenant: apps can be built in the Azure Active Directory tenant it is expected to be hosted. For example, it is now possible for maker@contoso.com to build apps directly in the ContosoSubsidiaryA.com tenant.
This reduces the overhead in building and deploying apps in organizations with multiple tenants because of mergers and acquisitions, organizations that use multiple AD tenants for compliance and auditing purposes, e.g. users authenticate in one tenant and access and edit resources in alternate tenants, and organizations that have business partners or contractors working on across tenant boundaries.
Learn more with admin documentation and maker documentation.
Improved app monitoring with experimental Application Insights features
Two new experimental features are now available for canvas apps connected to Application Insights. The first feature reports unhandled errors experienced by end-users. The second enables correlation tracing across canvas apps and connected custom connectors. Both features can be enabled in the upcoming features menu.
Error reporting will pass unhandled errors during runtime, which end-users experience as a red error banner notification, to Application Insights. Error reporting is a powerful feature that enables trend analysis and proactive alerting on errors experienced by app users. No longer do you have to rely on users to report issues with production apps!
Correlation tracing is a powerful tool to join telemetry events across apps and connected services. Without any added work you can now see outbound requests to custom connectors. For custom connectors that are instrumented with Application Insights, telemetry associated with a call from an app to the connector can be joined to supply a full picture of the call stack. This can be incredibly helpful in debugging issues.
Learn more at Analyze telemetry of a canvas app using Application Insights – Power Apps | Microsoft Docs
ESLint rules for Power Apps and Dynamics 365
In 2019, we announced the general availability of Solution Checker. This helped many of you analyze your solutions and packages for any issues in your customizations. We got feedback from you that this is very valuable in finding and addressing issues before deploying to production environments.
Today we’re taking a step further and bringing these validations to your development environment to help you find and fix issues in your JavaScript code before being added to a solution. We are excited to announce the public preview of ESLint rules for Power Apps model-driven apps and Dynamics 365 CE.
Learn more at the original blog post.
Creating canvas apps as Dataverse solutions by default
We are excited to announce the release of canvas apps creation as Dataverse solutions by default in public preview. Solutions are used to transport apps, flows, tables and other components from one environment to another and are a key mechanism for implementing healthy application lifecycle management (ALM) in the Power Platform.
Unlike model-driven apps and most other objects, makers can optionally create their canvas apps outside of a solution and outside Dataverse. This can lead to unhealthy ALM practices, and create an overhead for DevOps teams and admins as they try to automate their ALM process. With this feature, environment admins will be able to set citizen makers and developers in a healthy ALM ready state from day one by enabling canvas apps as Dataverse solutions by default for one or more environments.
Learn more at the original blog post.
Maker Productivity
Table designer now in preview in the canvas and model-driven app designers
We are excited to announce that you can now create new Dataverse tables and edit them using the table designer in the standalone model-driven app designer. This new feature allows you to have a one stop shop for all your table creation and data editing needs by saving you the time it takes moving between designers.
- Create a new table – While creating a new Dataverse table is easy to do today, as a user who might have the need to add multiple tables to your app page or even continue from an already existing table, this newly launched experience will allow you to do all of these while still working in the model-driven app designer.
- Edit your Dataverse table – Formerly, to create a new Dataverse table you would have to go to the Data sources pane from the model-driven app design to select the actual table needed to be edited which would usually automatically open up in a new tab causing loss of context between the action being taken and the work being done. With this new experience you can now make all your edits in one place, have your changes saved automatically and continue with the order of business.
Learn more about how to work-with-model-driven-app-pages
And this isn’t limited to just model driven apps! Also, for canvas apps, you can now create and edit Dataverse tables in the current Dataverse environment right from the canvas app designer. You can also add and edit data in those tables right within the canvas studio without leaving the context of your work.
Ready to get started? Learn more about creating Dataverse tables in the canvas app designer here.
Automatically create a Power App from a REST API
Custom connectors exist today to be the bridge between Power Platform and Azure Functions (or other REST APIs). But, there are still many manual steps that must be followed to create a functional Power App once a custom connector is in place. The ‘canvas create’ feature of the PAC CLI gives pro developers an easy way to get up and running by letting them automatically generate a functional Power App directly from a custom connector. With this feature, a single command line function will let developers generate a canvas app from their API definition. The app can then be imported into Power Apps Studio for further edits or customization. Makers and developers alike can benefit from the productivity of low code and Power Apps to quickly build rich user experiences over their APIs.
Learn more at the original blog post.
Modern command bar in Canvas
The modern command bar is now officially available behind the preview toggle in Settings for canvas page authoring. The new command bar not only has a modern look and feel but is also designed to improve your authoring experience. It allows a seamless customization experience of editing common controls by dynamically displaying the common properties directly within the command bar. This experience can be enabled via ‘Settings’ under ‘Upcoming features’ > ‘Preview’ in canvas web today and will soon be available by default.
Learn more at the docs page.
Install Apps via Power Platform CLI & Install API
This capability enables automation of install and update experiences that are offered only through the Power Platform Admin Center experience today. Installs can also be automated for applications available from AppSource provided at least one such install of the said application has been made to another environment within the tenant.
This public API and tools support opens the possibility for Admins and developers to install applications as part of CI/CD automated processes using their tool of choice. We have enabled this capability directly from Power Platform CLI to ease the onboarding effort for our customers; GitHub and Azure DevOps actions support is forthcoming. Enabling this API and associated tooling addresses a major gap in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) story for the Power Platform. We expect significant productivity gains for Pro-developers with this investment; they can now provision Dev, Test and Prod environments and install applications of their choice to those environments before importing their solution(s) ensuring the whole process can be fully automated. In many instances, solutions being developed require pre-requisite applications to be installed already in the target environment; this capability makes this achievable.
Learn more at the original blog post and the App Install CLI Command, Step-By-Step Tutorial, and API Reference docs pages.
Learning and Doc Updates
We’ve also released new, and made updates to some of documentation – see a summary before of some of the key updates :
We are looking forward to seeing everyone at the Microsoft sponsored Power Platform Conference on September 18-23 in Orlando, Florida. If you haven’t already you can register here.
Please continue sending us your feedback on features you would like to see in Power Apps. We hope that you enjoy the update!