3 Different Types of Power Apps Explained

today we're going to talk about the three types of power apps that you can build and give you some reasons why you might choose one of the three options [Music] hi everybody my name is matt and i'm going to talk to you today a little bit about power apps and the different types of power apps that you can build if you've ever built a power app you might have seen that you can select several different options and you might be confused about which one's the right option for the type of app that you want to build this video is intended to try to help you understand the differences and why you might choose one over the other so today we're going to be covering canvas apps model driven apps and portals the first type of app we're going to talk about is going to be the canvas app and within a canvas app there's really three main areas or things to remember the first of them is that it's really raw and flexible so you really end up when you start making a canvas app it's really a blank canvas for you to add drag and drop components create a look that is really tailored to what you're looking for you can have a lot of control over the interactions that users have with data and with elements within the app using excel style expressions and formulas the second thing is that a canvas app is really the foundation for extending sharepoint so when you're in sharepoint and you're going to edit a form a list form or a document form and you click the little edit this form button it's what it's actually doing is opening up a specialized version of a canvas app within powerapps and you can do largely the same things you could do with the traditional canvas app using that same interface and the last thing i want to talk about is the connections so canvas apps have a large variety of connections that you can use and they're really flexible so you can connect to pretty much any type of data source you might want whether or not it be something really advanced like sql or cds or if you just want to connect to sharepoint to get some data to give you a little better understanding of what it might look like uh on the screen here this is an example uh canvas app that has been built um you can see that there's on the left hand side there's a lot of different controls and screens so each one of these is a screen and on the right hand side there's a bunch of uh actions and configurations that you can make to those controls and just remember that if you're looking to build a canvas app it's really for when you want to have total control or as much control as possible around the experience for users or when you want to extend sharepoint or when you're looking to connect to a variety of data sources next we want to talk about model driven apps model driven apps are is a is a paradigm that is built squarely on the dataverse which the dataverse is the new name for what used to be called the common data service or cds so everything related to model driven development is all about defining the the tables and entities within the cds with the appropriate forms dashboards charts and then surfacing them through a model driven app that has a specific navigation and interactions with the user so again probably one of the most important things to remember is that everything is dependent on the cds so again this particular type of app requires licensing that gives you access to the cds or the dataverse in addition this type of development is also the primary way that dynamics is extended so if you're someone who has a dynamics implementation you may be familiar a little bit with model driven development already or if you're not once you learn these skills they would be directly applicable to some of the dynamic customizations to give you an idea of what a model driven app might look like uh what we're showing you on the screen is an example model driven application that has a dashboard which is the main thing we're seeing here which has main elements so like uh the active challenges that's a chart um that's been dropped onto this page that chart was again defined within a table an entity within the dataverse so again everything is defined within those data versus entities and then they're surfaced within a model driven app as you can see through the example you're not going to have the same drag and drop experience that you have with a canvas app but you're going to get the benefits of configuring entities and reusing those that configuration for forms or for views over and over in potentially multiple pages or multiple multiple model driven applications without having to go and reconfigure it every single time the last power app we want to talk about is portals portals are different than the previous two power apps that we talked about in that canvas apps and model driven apps are for more for your internal staff to interact with the data portals is exclusively for external partners or external customers and when they interact with a portal it's going to be very much like they're just going to a website and accessing it that through a traditional url and looking at it with from the perspective of any other public-facing website that they might log on to and get access to data so on the other side for your internal staff working with a portal is going to be very similar to what they've experienced working with a model driven application or in dynamics because the data is all dataverse data so when you're configuring a form or configuring a view or a dashboard you can then use those same things within a portal in addition to static website content using traditional cms methods if you've ever built a traditional portal that customers might log into you know just how difficult it can be to get data to show up on the screen and be secured properly a lot of that is simplified by using a portal because again you're using the dataverse as the backend for all of this another important note about powerapps portals is the licensing difference in both canvas apps and model driven applications you're really talking about a per user license for your internal staff that might be using or creating the app with the powerapps portal the licensing is done in two different ways one for authenticated users and one for unauthenticated users and you basically pay per user per month or per day depending on whether or not it's authenticated or unauthenticated content if you're interested in more information about powerapps portals we have another video that goes into a little bit more detail and we even go through an example powerapps portal if you are interested in that check out the description we've got a link hopefully this video helps you understand the different types of power apps available to you if you're looking to have the most control over what you're trying to develop you should be looking at a canvas app if you're working with data in the dataverse you should really consider a model driven application as it'll be a little bit easier for you to reuse whatever you develop if you need to engage with external users customers or partners maybe powerapps portals is probably the solution for you if you have any questions feel free to comment below and if you want to get notified when we release new content like this subscribe to our channel thanks for watching i'll catch you guys on my next video [Music] you

Channel: Bulb Digital

Views: 340

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Id: NmF1treovxE

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021