{"id":13298,"date":"2016-09-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-29T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/post\/office-365-powerapps-part-1\/"},"modified":"2021-12-15T00:13:19","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T05:13:19","slug":"office-365-powerapps-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/blog\/office-365-powerapps-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Office 365 PowerApps Deep(ish) Dive \u2013 Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this series of blogs, we explore the key capabilities in Office 365 and SharePoint to create business solutions, with a primary focus on PowerApps.<\/h2>\n

Instead of listing the functionalities, we help you build a PowerApp.<\/p>\n

Part one of a series<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Even though PowerApps is still in “Preview,” it continues to evolve at a rapid pace. A recent addition to the product: the ability to create PowerApps through the browser interface. While each version brings better functionality, I thought this would be a great time to do a bit of a deeper dive into some of the technical features of the product. I could certainly list out those functionalities, and provide a description, but that is completely boring. Just building a PowerApp would be much more fun!<\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s jump right in with the following completely hypothetical<\/strong> requirements:<\/p>\n

So,\u00a0let\u2019s say I have decided to quit technology altogether and open a chain of restaurants across the United States. I plan to offer decent food at ridiculously low prices, but also allow each restaurant to create their own menus based on a specific set of food items. However, each restaurant will use a new Menu Management PowerApp<\/em> to create and submit their menus to me for approval.<\/p>\n

SharePoint Integration<\/h2>\n

To store my data for the new Menu Management PowerApp, I\u2019m going to leverage SharePoint lists to store the data. Why use SharePoint for this?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. My data architecture\u00a0will\u00a0not be overly complex.<\/li>\n
  2. Since it\u2019s a part of my Office 365 subscription, there is no additional cost. Whereas setting up a SQL Database on-prem, or in Azure\/AWS would incur additional overhead.<\/li>\n
  3. It\u2019s much easier to manage than an SQL\u00a0database.<\/li>\n
  4. With the recently released Modern SharePoint Lists in Office 365, integration is pretty simple\u00a0to set up and maintain.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, with that, I have created a site in my SharePoint Online Tenant that will hold the lists I will use for this new PowerApp. I will initially create three lists that will house the data necessary for users to submit new menus for approval:<\/p>\n

    Menu Items<\/h2>\n

    This list will contain necessary data for each Menu item that will be available for the users to select for their menu in the Menu Management PowerApp.<\/p>\n

    \"padd1<\/a><\/p>\n

    I have added the following columns to my custom list:<\/p>\n