What’s new: Power Apps March 2024 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. This month we’ve got a great set of updates for Makers, Admins, and users across Power Apps, Dataverse and Copilot.
Trust
- Whitepaper: Enterprise Security with Power Platform
- Hierarchical security model
- Legacy web client app hiding for admins
Maker Productivity
- Introducing inline actions for canvas apps
- Directly call SQL Server stored procs in Power Apps (Preview release)
- Announcing General Availability of built-in Dataverse offline for canvas apps
- Combining tables with the Power Fx Table function
- Power Fx EncodeHTML function
- Power Fx JSON function FlattenValueTables option
- Power Fx UniChar function
End User Productivity
- Power apps mobile users (Makers / End users) can set an app as a startup app.
Trust
Whitepaper: Enterprise Security with Power Platform
This white paper shows you how to align Power Platform with your security practices. You’ll learn how to use the tools and technologies in Power Platform to configure and manage your apps and data according to your security requirements. You’ll also discover the benefits of using Power Platform to empower your security team and accelerate your digital transformation efforts.
Learn more at Enterprise security with Power Platform – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Hierarchical security model
Dataverse Hierarchy security provides you with a data access model where manager has access to the records owned by their direct reports, shared with their direct reports, or owned by the team that their direct report is a member of. The security structure is based on the relationship between different roles, positions, or organization levels. Record access permissions are inherited within the hierarchy. Security role and user management administration is simplified where rules are set at the higher levels of the management chains.
We are announcing that you can now include or exclude disabled status direct report’s records in the manager’s views of the hierarchy security.
Learn more at Hierarchy security – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Legacy web client app hiding for admins
The legacy web client app called “Dynamics 365 – custom” was created to help with transition from the Web Client interface to Unified Client interface. This app uses the newer interface but is not a model driven app and is missing key features including the new modern look.
This property will be gradually rolling out in April. Starting in May we will default new environments to hide for admins and with 2406 monthly channel release we will hide the app for admins in monthly channel.
Learn more at Enable Unified Interface Only – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Maker Productivity
Introducing inline actions for canvas apps
Work with controls without leaving the canvas using new inline actions! Inline actions let you quickly update your data and layouts without getting out of the zone and brings the power of Copilot right to where you’re working. Use inline actions to perform the most common editing tasks without having to go digging for the right property to update, getting your app to the finish line more quickly.
Learn more at Introducing inline actions | Microsoft Power Apps
Directly call SQL Server stored procs in Power Apps (Preview release)
Speed up the performance of your Power App over SQL Server by directly calling SQL Server stored procs from Power Fx. The ability to call stored procedures for the SQL connector directly is an extension to the existing tabular model and gives users access to tables, views, and stored procedures. You can invoke the stored procedures from Power Fx on action controls and galleries / tables. This feature extends our ongoing support enabling customers to modernize their apps over SQL Server (in the cloud on on-prem.)
Learn more at Call SQL Server stored procedures directly in Power Fx (Preview) | Microsoft Power Apps
Announcing General Availability of built-in Dataverse offline for canvas apps
We are pleased to announce the General Availability of mobile offline support for canvas apps on iOS, Android and Windows devices. With the flip of a switch, your app can work with Dataverse data wherever you are–with or without network connection. Just build your app with standard Power Fx formulas and the offline feature handles all the complexity for you.
Learn more at Announcing General Availability of built-in Dataverse offline for canvas apps | Microsoft Power Apps
Combining tables with the Power Fx Table function
Have you ever needed to combine two tables into one? There isn’t a great solution today, the most common workaround being to use ForAll and Ungroup functions together and is not intuitive.
Now there is a better way. The Table function has been expanded to combine tables as well as records. For example, the result of `Table( [1,2], [3,4] )` is now the table `[1,2,3,4]`. This feature is in preview environments now and will be deployed more broadly starting next week.
The Table function can now also be used to append records to a table, for example ` Table( { Value: “XS” }, [ “S”, “M”, “L” ], { Value: “XL” } )` results in the table `[“XS”, “S”, “M”, “L”, “XL”]`.
Learn more at Table function – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Power Fx EncodeHTML function
As Power Fx becomes used more for generating HTML, we need a good way to escape the tags, a facility common in many other languages.
Welcome the EncodeHTML function. This function will replace tag and entity characters with their equivalent HTML representations, so that they will display as raw text on a web page. For example, `&`, `<`, and `>` are replaced with `&`, `<`, and `>` respectively.
Learn more at EncodeHTML, EncodeUrl, and PlainText functions – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Power Fx JSON function FlattenValueTables option
In Power Fx, `[1,2,3]` represents a table of records, each record containing a Value column. That can be surprising for those coming from JavaScript where that notation represents an array of three numbers. This difference can become a challenge when translating to and from JSON.
To make that easier, we have added a new option to the JSON function that flattens Value table to a JSON array.
Learn more at JSON function – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Power Fx UniChar function
From the beginning, Power Fx has been a Unicode based product. And yet all we have had was the Char function that is very limited. Excel has the Char and UniChar functions, how about Power Fx?
Introducing the UniChar function to Power Fx.
Learn more at Char and UniChar functions – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
End User Productivity
Power apps mobile users (Makers / End users) can set an app as a startup app.
More than 70% of power apps mobile users open same app every day. To open that app, they tap on power apps mobile icon, wait for the home page to load and then tap again on the app icon.
Power apps mobile home page takes anywhere between 10 to 20 seconds to load. Hence, users end up waiting for long time to open the app they use everyday. This experience hampers their productivity and leads to frustrations when devices are low end. Makers need to create deep links and complex shortcuts to test apps there are creating.
Startup app feature addresses these issues. Once an app is set as the startup app, it opens by default when users open Power Apps mobile app. It not only saves the wait time to load home page but also saves one extra tap to open app post loading power apps mobile.
Learn more at Set an app as a startup app – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
We’ve also released new, and made updates to some of our documentation – see a summary before of some of the key updates:
Please continue sending us your feedback on features you would like to see in Power Apps. We hope that you enjoy the update!
