Power Apps and Power Automate: Advanced Patterns

Working with Environments in the Power Platform

This chapter introduces how Environments can used to separate your development, acceptance and production environment. It also explains how you configure environment security so that only approved users can create and manage environments.

• Overview of the Power Platform
• The role of Environments in the Power Platform
• Creating and managing Environments
• Environments and security
• The Default Environment
• LAB: Creating Environments

Working with Solutions in the Power Platform

Solutions are used by app makers and developers to package related customizations together so that they can be managed and deployed as a single unit. We will see what components can be added to a solution and how they are essentially the building blocks of your environment.

• Working with solutions in Environments
• Default Solutions in an Environment
• Creating Solutions and Solution Publishers
• Creating Canvas apps and Power Automate Flows inside a Solution
• Importing and Exporting Solutions
• Managed versus Unmanaged Solutions
• Importing and Exporting Solutions
• Solutions and Managed Properties
• LAB: Creating environments and solutions

Working with Connection References and Environment Variables

In this chapter you will learn about Connection References and Environment Variables and how they can be used to solve the issue of connecting to separate development/acceptance/production data sources without having to make major changes in a Power Automate Flow or Canvas App.

• Introducing Connection References
• Connection References In Power Automate Cloud Flows
• Connection References In Canvas Apps
• Manually creating Connection References in Solutions
• Importing Solutions with Connection References
• Connection References Gotchas
• LAB: Working with Connection References and Environment Variables

Application lifecycle management (ALM) with the Microsoft Power Platform

When developing larger apps and flows it is important to separate your development, acceptance and production environments. In this chapter your will learn how to implement ALM in the Power Platform. You will also see how to unpack Canvas app into Power Fx and store your source code in GitHub. From the source code you can reassemble your solutions and import them in your acceptance or production environments.

• The Microsoft Power Platform CLI
• Application Lifecycle Management with the Power Platform CLI
• Application Lifecycle Management with Azure DevOps
• Using GitHub with a Canvas app
• Editing a Canvas app using Power Fx and Visual Studio Code
• LAB: ALM with the Power Platform

Using Microsoft Dataverse in Canvas Apps and Power Automate Flow

Almost every Canvas app and Power Automate Flow will have to deal with data somehow. This chapter introduces Microsoft Dataverse as an easy to use and scalable data source compared to storing data in Excel files or SharePoint lists.

• Using Microsoft Dataverse as a data source
• Creating Tables in Microsoft Dataverse
• Creating Columns, Relationships Forms and Views in a Table
• Combining Microsoft Dataverse, Canvas apps and Power Automate
• LAB: Using Microsoft Dataverse in Canvas Apps and Power Automate Flow