Are you pumped about Microsoft Fabric? The vision to simplify data blending, analysis, security, governance, and discovery is exciting! OneLake is a rich SaaS service and the core of Fabric’s lake-centric approach. I’ve been tinkering with it’s integration of extended Power Platform components like Dataverse and Power Apps.
The ability to launch Microsoft Fabric directly from the Power Apps experience is coming soon. How can you bring existing Dataverse data into Fabric until the direct integration is released?
Do you want to add drop shadows to elements in your PowerApps without using images?
PowerApps does not provide an OOB property to set shadows for elements or controls but you can use the HTML text control to add html with custom styles to implement the desired shadow effect.
SVGs are another great way to generate custom icons, images, shadow effects, animations and much more. I love going the SVG route for animation effects and complex visuals as such. In this post we will walk through a simple html-css trick for adding effects to your app elements without the need for images.
Social media is brimming with several great blogs, videos, documentation and information that I want to keep up on. And there isn’t enough time in a day to watch or read all the awesome content. Often I come across great posts on my social media feeds or search results based on a problem I’m trying to solve and end up creating bookmarks or leaving several tabs open for reading later. I hardly get to all those tabs/bookmarks and eventually lose track of what I was looking for in the first place.
It got me thinking on how I can efficiently manage bookmarks with just a browser click and incorporate the brilliance of Microsoft Flow to tie in multitude of supported services. Ideally, I’d like to have a placeholder for such content and take notes while reviewing them for future reference, knowledge sharing and follow up actions. I started building a simple Chrome Extension to capture the Title and URL of a webpage and use Flow to create a OneNote section with the captured details.
Chrome Extension
Chrome Extension is just a group of files that are triggered based on browser events and run behind the scenes to enhance your Chrome browsing experience. Building a Chrome Extension is as cool as it sounds. It may seem complicated at first view but it really is relatively easy to develop. You don’t need to be an expert dev and having a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS can get you started on extensions in no time.
App makers like us often need to test apps in an incremental fashion to help progress the app design by validating formulas, expressions, data manipulation, control settings etc. Knowing the shortcuts to test apps in the canvas/web studio will save us time!
Here are two Windows keyboard shortcuts to improve your app testing experience:
As part of the Flow design process, I often end up building in some debug actions like Send email, Set variable etc. to capture/troubleshoot values that in turn help along with the actual design. But I’d want to retain those actions for debugging later rather than recreate them. Also when building/designing complex Flows I need to find failing actions and test or disable subset of actions.
Issue
Ideally, you want to be able to deactivate or skip a specific action or set of actions. Microsoft Flow does not have this feature available at this point of time. This requires you to either create a copy of the flow for testing purposes or debug by deleting actions only to realize later that those actions you just deleted weren’t causing the issue. This means you’ll need to re-configure those actions from scratch to restore your Flow design which can be time consuming.
Resolution
Below are two approaches I’ve used and found useful for disabling/skipping actions for testing and debugging purposes.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!! What a year it’s been – full of successes, changes and everything in between. There have been so many amazing community influencers and incredible posts in the Microsoft Power Platform space in 2018. And 2019 promises to get even better with more community mentors, leaders and super cool content!
I’ve learnt so much from this community and I’m incredibly thankful for that. You guys and gals are amazing!!
Here’s a quick list of some of my fave reads and influencers that inspired my learning experience by month and made 2018 one of the best years. Even though posts are listed by month in the order I got to learn from them, each of those influencers have continued to contribute jaw-droppingly amazing stuff throughout the year. This is also a comprehensive list of people you’d want to follow to be in the know on the latest & greatest in this space.
According to the Endowed Progress Effect (which is a phenomenon integrated into designing any UX process based on how the human brain makes decisions) we’re more likely to complete an action if there’s an illusion of progress and an effective visual aid of contextual information for landing pages. The best examples I can think of are –
Multi-step forms that break up a long intimidating form into smaller sections and provides the user a sense of accomplishment as they proceed from step to step.
Breadcrumb navigation to improve findability for users especially in apps with a lot of screens.
How do we incorporate those fancy, stylish and yet functional multi-step form indicators seen on websites in PowerApps using the OOB controls without custom scripts?
This is a two part series post with the first being multi-step form indicators in PowerApps and the second part of the series will walk through creating breadcrumb navigation from scratch.
In the first part of this series we walked through creating multi-step form indicators in PowerApps. This post will help build a simple secondary navigation scheme using breadcrumbs to indicate the location of a user within the app’s hierarchy. They come in handy when apps have several nested screens and an effective visual aid is needed from a user’s perspective for contextual information around primary app screens.
Brian Dang has a terrific video on a fully functional back button system that breadcrumbs your way back based on your clicks. It’s multi-functional and can also be used for building an undo system. This post is an inspiration from his work. Thanks to Mr. Dang for the useful design pattern!
Below is the sample breadcrumb navigation we’ll be creating. I also uploaded a sample PowerApp to the PowerApps Community Gallery with the below breadcrumb design pattern and multi-step form indicator templates. Feel to free to reuse and/or provide feedback. I’d love to know if it helped enhance your PowerApps user experience.
Recently a customer asked if PowerApps can support role based security controlled by SharePoint Security Groups. For example, can you make an Admin screen that is visible only to users who belong to a specific SharePoint Security Group? Yes, you can and this is where Microsoft Flow comes to the rescue!
This blog post is an attempt to share an approach for finding out the SharePoint Group membership of a signed in user and make certain features or screens of an app available to them.
Business Applications, Azure & M365 musings 