In this blog let us see what is PowerApps, PowerBI and Flow. I will orient you about all these products one by one. All these are excellent products for power users and even for developers, almost no coding is required.
PowerApps is the app development platform, with which we can develop apps compatible with mobile, tab and can also be viewed in desktop or laptop browsers with no additional coding required.
To learn PowerApps like any other technology, you need to understand its UI design, the connectors and its integration capabilities.
Data is the heart of any application and I always prefer to understand the data connectivity first. It’s really easy to do DB operations in PowerApps with readily available connectors. There are two types of connectors used for PowerApps
- Standard Connectors
- Custom Connectors
Standard Connectors are the connectors which are supported by PowerApps. and if you want to connect to your own web service its called custom connector. You have to register your custom connectors before you consume it. PowerApps can connect to any of existing data you have in the organisation either on premise or on cloud.
The most popular connectors are mentioned below:
- Common Data Service
- SharePoint
- SQL Server
- Dynamics 365
- Office 365 Users
- Office 365 Outlook
- Excel
- OneDrive and OneDrive for business
- Dropbox
In case you need to connect to on premise data sources, PowerApps provides excellent feature of on Premise gateways. We can install on premise gateway and then connect to on premise data base through this gateway. Gateway should be in the same network where your database exists. once you have the gateway ready, you can define the connector to connect to your on premise database using this gateway.
We can go through detailed steps on how to actually create the connectors and connect to data sources in my subsequent blogs
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