Author: My SharePoint Questions

PowerApps Design Trends 2021 Apps

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Today I have my first video for design trends in 2021 with Phone Apps. I plan to re-create many design trends from phones apps in PowerApps.

Every user is accustomed to using apps a certain way. If we can design our apps to the create good experiences that are actually delightful to interact with the more people who are going to love our apps.

Give me a chance to create more content! It’s coming soon.

  1. Sliding Menus from the Bottom – The first app design that I worked on is creating a sliding menu from the bottom that contains features used to filter and manipulate data.

2. Fading Galleries and Charts – There’s no easy way to simple way yet to fade objects in PowerApps. This video is part two of the phone app above. We adjust the opacity over time!

Video | Don’t Use SharePoint Lookups with PowerApps

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SharePoint LookUp columns create complexity in PowerApps. I understand you want your users to be able to update the choice fields in a PowerApps. Or you have a very large list of choices that need to be managed.

Create the “LookUp” columns in PowerApps instead of SharePoint Lookup Columns.

I can’t write to you and show you all the steps easily… like I said let’s keep it simple.

Check it out!

Power Platform Licenses | PowerApps Power Automate

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It’s well known that Microsoft’s licensing models can be rather confusing. Here is a video to discuss details about the licensing model of the Power Platform, with or without Office 365.

  1. Office 365 – E1, E3, E5, G1, G3, G5 come with standard PowerApps/Power Automate licensing does not including premium connectors.
  2. PowerApps – app makers and users need premium licenses(per app or per user) to use premium connectors.
  3. Power Automate – in order to make the connector or trigger a flow of a premium connector you need the premium licenses.

Links to help you understand the licensing model:

Power Platform License options: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2019wave2/power-automate/new-licensing-options-power-automate-standalone-paid-plans

FAQ: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/powerapps-flow-licensing-faq

Gov Sub: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/powerapps-us-government

Pricing PowerApps Premium/or Stand-alone license: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Pricing PowerAutomate Premium/or Stand-alone license: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

PowerApps has a new pricing model starting October 2021: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/pricing_and_licensing_updates_coming_to_power_apps

More tips on per app and per user licensing model:

3 Tips to make your Power Automates Flows from Beginner to Professional

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1. Use a ‘Trigger Condition’ if possible

Trigger Conditions work the same as an “if then” statement or an expression. If the value is equal to, “lessthan”, “greaterthan”, or “contains” fuction then trigger the Power Automate Flow. You can use a boolean value, true or false, or even base it off a currency column if the value is greater than $10,000. This keeps your flows from running when it doesn’t need to. Some Power Automate licensing models are based off the number of Flows that ran. Use a trigger condition so you don’t waste any of your flow runs!

You can get to Trigger Conditions by going to the settings of your Trigger.

2. Create Error Handling with ‘Configure Run After’

Configure Run After.

You can configure a step in your Flow to run after a previous step if it’s successful, failed, skipped, or timed out. This way if a step fails you can send yourself an email, send a text message, send yourself a message on Facebook, Teams, or Twitter. Usually when I do a configure run after, it’s during a parallel branch. This is a great way to notify yourself to come check out the reason for the failure!

Notice the red arrow on the configure run after a failure to Update the Item.

3. The Degree of Parallelism can increase the speed of ‘Apply to Each’ functions

By default, loops run in sequence which would be a parallelsim of 1. That means only one record is processed at a the same time. You can improve the speed of a flow by enabling ‘Concurrency Control’ and increasing the ‘Degree of parallelsim’ in a ‘Apply to Each’ step.

**Last Extra Tip**

I think this is known across all development work, and that is to label label label your steps in your Flow. If you label the steps in your Flow it will be easier to fix problems and other people will be able to understand your Flow also. It’s the #1 most important thing to do if you work in a team environment.

Power Automate | Get the first characters of a string (Using Substring)

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With PowerAutomate I noticed that you can not just use substring to get the first few characters, or in this example let’s say if you were writing to SQL and only wanted the first 255 characters.

If your string is below 255 characters you will receive this error message:

“The template language function ‘substring’ parameters are out of range: ‘start index’ and ‘length’ must be non-negative integers and their sum must be no larger than the length of the string. “

The work around is to use an “If then statement” and checking the length of your variable first, like the example below:

if(lessOrEquals(length(variables('FirstName')),255),variables('FirstName'),substring(variables('FirstName'),0,255))

An example of a Power Automate Flow I have used it in is below:

  1. Initialize your Variable.

2. Write to your database using the “if then length substring” formula.