We’re very excited to announce modern commanding with Power Fx is now generally available (GA). Modern commanding provides a maker friendly low-code/no-code experience for customizing model-driven app command bars – with the first ever in-product command designer and the ability to use Power Fx (or JavaScript) for expressing business logic.

Goals and new features for GA

Modern commanding has many improvements since the preview was announced last year. We sincerely appreciate the overwhelming amount of support and feedback from the Power Platform community and the close partnership with Scott Durrow (Microsoft MVP and Ribbon Workbench creator). This has helped shape the below goals and GA features.

Makers love the experience

A large number of usability and maker productivity improvements have resulted in a simpler and streamlined maker experience. A few highlights include the addition of copy + paste, optimized navigation & layout, drag and drop within command designer, performance improvements, and deferring creation of command component libraries.

Do more with Power Fx

Various new functions are now available to better support common command use cases. Defining visibility, actions, and interacting with custom pages is now much more powerful. For example, control command visibility using RecordInfo() and DataSourceInfo(), and work with unsaved data (aka the buffer) using Self.Selected.Unsaved.

No cliffs

Many parity gaps with classic Ribbon commands have been closed (+ a ton of new goodness not previously possible). For example, now you can create dropdowns, split buttons, and groups as well as specify different scopes – which determine whether a command is published to a single app, to a table and all apps using it, or even globally to all apps and all tables.

These new scopes prevent duplicating effort for commands that need to be present in multiple apps. As an added benefit, when citizen developers modify or hide broader scoped commands, their changes are automatically isolated within their app and other apps remain unaffected.

Rock solid reliability and ALM

The most important improvements are not typically visible. We’ve made significant investments into strengthening the modern commanding infrastructure, fixing issues, improving performance and reliability, and ensuring application lifecycle management is handled consistently.

What’s next?

GA is a milestone, not an end state. There’s much more we’d like to do and while I can’t share everything just yet, here’s a few improvements coming soon:

• Editing Microsoft first party (OOB) commands using modern command designer. We realize this limitation is especially painful and have been working diligently to solve this complex problem reliably.
  • Classic OOB commands will be incrementally migrated to the modern commanding infrastructure.
  • Migrated commands will be fully supported in command designer.
  • Migration will not impact existing customer customization or the ability to continue using classic capabilities. We’ll later provide an easy button to migrate your own classic commands.
• Support for classic enable rules, display rules, and custom rules.
• Supporting additional Power Fx functions and improving the publishing experience.
• Addressing other known limitations.

Learn more

Check out the modern commanding documentation as well as the recent Power CAT Live interview with Phil Topness, Prabhat Pandey, and Casey Burke.