In this episode of the {low-code} bus journey 🚍 we go back to our childhood. Kids often take things apart in an effort to understand how they work.
Listen to a recording of this post:
I did it with an old tape deck and, as a biologist, I learned anatomy, physiology, and evolution through dissections and experiments. This process intuitively leads us to look at the components of something and how they interact. Not only can we learn to fix things, but we can also learn how to build our own things. Confession, I have not built my own cockroach, but I think that is probably a good thing 😊.
Let’s start by looking inside the asset tracker app we built and slightly modified last time. It would make for a really long and tedious episode if we had to go through every single detail of the app. Therefore, I will go through some of the pieces that I think might be most helpful at this stage of our journey. Let’s get our tools out and get on with our dissection.
Go to https://make.powerapps.com. Next, locate and click the apps list menu option on the left. Look for the asset tracker app. Once you locate the asset tracker app, click on the ellipsis and select “Edit.” This will open the App Studio. Here we will get a lot of help to start visually learning all the pieces that make up an app and how they work. The rest of this episode is heavy on the video side, so take out your notepad, get your pencil (what is that?) and lets gets down to it, because the {low-code} bus is ready to take off.
The videos below will guide you through:
- The app dissection process, you will learn how icons are associated with actions when you click on them by looking at the functions associated with the OnSelect property.
- You will learn about the elements associated with the different screens, such as how to configure the Browse Screen and the data cards associated with the DetailsScreen; including how to unlock them so that you can make changes.
- One of the interesting things you will learn is how the Edit Screen and the Edit Form can be used for two purposes, updating existing information, and creating new records, depending on how you structure your on select function to navigate to that screen.
All this work is completed without a single line of code. You are now learning that knowing how to write functions can be helpful and having basic knowledge of excel formulas makes it easy to work in power apps.
As we have shared before, though, this makes it clear that projects that would have taken hours upon hours of work can now be accomplished with a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. What this means is that individuals and teams within the organization can become citizen developers and advance their work in meaningful ways.
The Browse Screen
The Browse Gallery
The Details Screen
Video Edit Screen
Dr. Carlos Solís is Associate Vice President of the Technology Innovation Office.
