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Announcing the general availability of canvas components and component libraries

Headshot of article author Hemant Gaur

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of canvas components and component libraries.

Canvas components enable low code/no-code developers to build reusable UX components using default Power Apps controls as core building blocks. These custom components can then be shared across app screens or multiple apps both within and across Power Apps environments. Canvas components contributes directly towards Power Apps vision of empowering everyone to build apps by significantly accelerating app development process.

Following are the new enhancements which are part of this GA announcement.
Support for component library ALM
Makers can now package their apps and component libraries inside a single or multiple solutions and import them into a different environment. If a canvas app is using a component library, it is now tracked as a solution dependency. ALM support ensures that the dependency relationship is maintained in the target environment and any further library versions imported via solutions can deliver the updated components to the app. It enables 1st and 3rd party publishers to ship their components and customizable apps as baseline and then service apps by shipping just the updated component library. All standard solution actions such as managed properties, show dependencies, and add required components are supported inline with the Dataverse solution capabilities .
You can find more details here – component library application lifecycle management.

Component library and canvas app solution support.
Component library ALM support.

Image/multimedia file support 
You can now add multimedia files to the components inside a library. These components can then be used by all apps in an environment. Libraries with multimedia files can be moved across environments using the standard component application lifecycle management (ALM).
For details please refer to add multimedia to a component,

Add images to component
Add images to component

Custom pages
Canvas components can be used in model-driven apps using custom pages.  Canvas component library provide app makers the ability to create custom components using custom page supported set of controls which includes modern Fluent UI controls. These components can then be reused across custom pages and applications, and can be centrally updated, packaged, and moved using Dataverse solutions.
For More information see add canvas components to a custom page for your model-driven app.

Fundamentals investments – Performance, reliability and accessibility.
Canvas components have seen huge adoption across large and small organizations since our public preview announcement. Components already are being utilized heavily by hundreds of thousands of apps. We have been constantly monitoring user feedback, feature usage, errors and have been shipping weekly updates to improve feature fundamentals. Thanks everyone for helping us take feature to GA.

Looking forward to next phase of low code extensibility.

Cheers,
Hemant Gaur