One of the things that brings value to trips, journeys, and adventures is the time we take to reflect on what we have seen and experienced.
Listen to a recording of this post:
With this in mind, let’s take a moment to reflect on the things we learned during the {low-code} 🚍 journey to build an app from the ground up.
This will be especially valuable for our Microsoft 365 Champions 🦸♀️🦸♂️🥇 since it can help in sharing with others. After all, a key to learning is teaching, and a key to building community is sharing. #sharingiscaring.
Below are some of the highlights of the things we learned throughout this journey.
The Build an App from the Ground Up project brought some of the inner workings of Power Apps and the Power Platform into the picture and introduced some basic concepts of design. Especially working with a customer group and tackling the technical components only after we understood the needs of the users.
We talked about taking things a mile further by listening to the requirements of the Hammerhead Turtle Corporation, as well as to their concerns. Then, we engaged the users through focus groups to understand how we could bring value to them through the corporation’s app. We also helped increase the likelihood of success for the new app.
I discussed the above in the first post, and then introduced you to a way for making designs more consistent and easier to change by creating a Template-Master Screen Duo to set color schemes, icons, and fonts.
In the next episode, I looked at the data requirements for the application, and only after having established those did I choose a platform to host the data. In that part of the exercise, I decided to use a SharePoint list. This was a new concept we had not touched on before. It highlights a couple of things: i) the flexibility of Power Apps to leverage a diverse set of data sources in a single build, and ii) that some of those data sources are both powerful enough for limited deployment builds and accessible to most Microsoft 365 users.
We built the home screen during the second phase of our journey, and picked up another helpful skill. We learned to assign labels to buttons by using a function to look up their given category in the data source. This meant a few things: i) we did not need to create individual buttons for each item, and we did not have to hand-code their category; ii) if we switched the category for the item, we would not need to find the button and switch it too. A change in the category entry would immediately be reflected in the app, and iii) if we misspelled the category, we would only need to change it in one place. The app would be updated within seconds.
In the third phase of the journey, we built two screens, the Details Screen and the Edit Screen, then learned how to interconnect them. Again, we saved quite a bit of effort using our Template-Master Screen duo as initial sources. In building the Details Screen, we learned how to set a rich text field, reorganize content in an app screen, and take advantage of some of the default data fields that SharePoint automatically creates with each list. In this screen, we also learned how to delete items from our data source.
As we created the Edit Screen, we learned how PowerApps could use the Edit Screen as the tool to edit and update existing content in our data source. We also saw how to use the same screen to create new entries or content for our data source. The concept here was that the Edit Screen’s role is based on the structure-function we use to call it up. Additionally, we learned how to cancel edits and how to save edits.
Finally, as we hit the home stretch in our journey, we learned how to sort content on the home screen by specifying the order in which items appear in the browse gallery. Then we built a complex function to provide users with Search and Filter elements, entries by title and category. From there, the finishing touches were associated with the User Interface. We removed elements that did not help functionality, added color items where we defined Fill based on an If statement that looked at the item category. We applied the same principle to assign icons.
This build was a fantastic collection of skills and development of functions. Below are links to each episode so you can easily follow this as a lesson. Of course, we cannot forget the song we all came to love [or hate] during this journey: 🎼🎵🎶 We built all this amazing stuff with 🎶 No Code, 🎶 No Code, 🎶 No Code❗
- Building an app from the ground up with {low-code} – Part I: design process
- Building an app from the ground up, data source and home screen
- Building an app from the ground up, details and edit screens
- The low-code bus arrives: filtering, sorting, and making the app pretty
Dr. Carlos Balam-Kuk Solís is Associate Vice President for the Technology Innovation Office.
