This week we announce the general availability of our new data focused experiences and we’re excited to give you a tour of the changes here.

Updated list of tables

When diving into tables you often want to see what’s already available or find previously used tables to continue to edit. We’ve updated the list of tables to make it simpler to find what you need with extensive support for filtering, sorting, search and have provided some key pivots on this list.

We’ve also grouped the table commands in familiar ways to make it easy to find the option you’re looking for. The biggest change you’ll notice here is that tables can now be both Opened and Edited. Opening a table will navigate to the table hub and Editing a table will take you to the new full-screen table designer – we’ll have a look at both of these next!

Table hub

When you open a table, you’ll see a hub layout giving you an overview of the table with its properties and grouped links for related table components (like forms, views or columns). You’ll also see the top 10 rows of data for the table with controls to include other columns that already exist. This view lets you simply update data in a spreadsheet-style mode, and just like a spreadsheet you can quickly add new columns here too.

Diving into related table components, like columns, gives you the detail list of those items, with the same powerful sorting, filtering and searching. And to avoid jumping back and forth you can now switch between these lists with a dropdown in the breadcrumb.

Table designer

When you need to dive into the full data set, you can edit the table in a full-screen experience that gives you access to all the data in the table (of course, limited by the security roles you have!). For those that are more familiar with side-pane experiences around the Power Platform, you can also use the left pane in this view to manage which columns appear on the table as you edit.

Create an app quickly

Now that you have found or built your table, it is just one-click away to create a new modern app over that table, whether you’re on the table hub or in the full-screen experience – all you need to do is provide a name for your app and we’ll automate all the steps necessary to create the app, add your table to the sitemap with all forms and views available, and bring you into the modern app designer.

What’s using this table?

Often tables of data support many apps and flows, so to quickly find out what your updates to a table might impact, you can select a command on the table hub to view the list of apps and flows that are Using this table.

There is also a quick way to play or edit the apps and flows you find from this view.

Columns, data types and formats

With this update to tables experiences, we have also focused on columns as they are key to storing meaningful data – the majority of columns created are text, whole number or date/time so these are all readily available in a single-click.

However, we know other data types are key to many scenarios, and those can even have multiple formats. We’ve organized these data types and formats in an easy to work with way, as well as adding search to the menu.

Formats can now be updated after the column is created (switching between formats in the same data type), we have introduced a new format for text types called Rich text that allows you to store and work with rich data in your apps.

Advanced options are hidden by default but if you need to tweak some of this column properties you can expand that section of the panel to access all the other properties that columns support.

Choice columns

Providing users with a set of choices can really improve an app’s data entry experience and ensures that users are picking from a set list of items. We’ve enhanced the management of these column types to make it easy to sort, drag/drop reorder, set colors and get access to all the other properties of the choice, including support for extending out-of-the-box Status Reasons.

Advanced table tools

For those makers that are further along their journey with Power Apps and Dataverse, they are often looking for underlying table and column names for their code or integrations, so we’ve added Tools that will copy these names to the clipboard and allow you to open tabs to the table definition or data query APIs.

When working with the table in a solution you can browse tables in parent solutions of patches, and you can also review/update managed properties for both the table and all the related table components that support managed properties.

The post Announcing general availability of our new Dataverse experiences on Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This experience will soon become the default experience on the maker portal, but whilst we’re in preview if you run into any issues, you can disable the preview experience by toggling the switch on the solution list.

Navigating a solution

When opening a solution, you’ll now see that you navigate to a space dedicated to the solution with its own navigation. This dedicated experience will help you stay in context of the solution. To start there are three areas you can navigate to, let’s look at each:

Overview

This overview page gives you all the commands needed to manage the solution, such as Import/Export, Cloning, Publishing, as well as cards that help you manage the solution properties, solution health and a list of the recently updated objects in your solution.

Solution configuration pages are now accessible from here. The config page will open in a panel, allowing you to interact with the designated web resource.

Objects

The objects page is the heart of your solution, allowing you to create or add objects that make up your solution. To better help makers navigate around, there is a tree view of object types with the total count displayed per item. By default, the major Power Platform objects are represented here: Apps, Tables, Flows, Chatbots, as well as a way to search the tree. As you add other types to your solution, they will also appear in the tree.

Selecting a node in the tree will show you the list of objects, allowing you to interact with them as well as search, filter, and sort.

History

The history of operations for your solution are listed in this page, selecting a row will give you the details of the operation and allow you to diagnose any errors you may have run into.

New and Add existing menus

The number of different objects you can add to a solution is growing rapidly, so a flat list of objects to create or add to your solution was getting too long. A new experience for these menus is part of this enhancement, with a top-level menu that has the most used object types, expanding to object types that are used somewhat less frequently – and all other object types are alphabetized in a final overflow menu. Based on usage, we may promote or demote object types during the preview to make sure the most used are quickly accessible.

Dependencies

A powerful feature of objects in the Power Platform is their ability to depend on each other so that when you ship a solution you can take a dependency on another object, extending or changing the behavior of that object. Dependencies can become complex and understanding what dependencies exist is very helpful when managing your solutions.

To aid makers in discovering these dependencies, you can now see these dependencies for any object by selecting Show dependencies from the context menu or command bar, this will open a view that lists both dependent objects and required objects.

When deleting an object, you may receive a notification that you can’t delete the object because dependencies exist. You can now review these dependencies by selecting the action in the notification.

Dependencies also exist between solutions, especially when there a multiple managed solutions that layer to provide the complete experience to the end user. It can be very useful to understand how these solutions are inter-dependent. Selecting the Show dependencies command on the Overview page for a solution, or from the list of solutions, will give you a view into those dependencies and allow you to compare the changes by layer.

Many will ship a solution to another environment – during import the solution dependencies are checked, and if we find missing dependencies, we now show you the detail grouped by managed solution and those that are simply unmanaged objects in the source environment.

These views are especially useful to understand what other solutions need to be imported first and which objects in the source environment may have been missed when exporting. A future update will alert makers during export as well.

Workflows, Actions and Business process flows

Until now classic Workflows and Actions, as well as Business process flows, were not available to add to a solution without switching to classic or navigating to the Power Automate portal. All three types now have a quick create experience in the solution explorer.

Tables

When managing a table’s settings or adding a new table you will now have access to all the options available for a table, with the table configuration and primary column configuration split between two separate pivots in the panel.

Under Advanced options, the table properties are also grouped to provide more clarity on what they do: whether it be an option that affects the table, where the table shows up in other configurations, or whether the option impacts how rows of the table behave.

Some notable new options include creating and managing virtual tables, setting table color (either with a color swatch or hex code), and adding a web resource for the table image.

Web resources

Another set of objects that can now be created and updated on the maker portal are web resources. You can also quickly access like types by expanding Web resources item in the tree view to pick from Code, Data, or Images.

Performance

Performance has been a key goal of the updated design. Productivity of our makers is a top priority, so we’ve focused on parallel loading of experiences, caching, and improving performance of server-side operations. Some examples of where you’ll see great performance:

• Tree view has a new dedicated API and loads in parallel to the rest of the experience
• Tables are loaded shortly after the solution has opened to make searching the tree instant
• Lists of objects are paged, with infinite scrolling that will load subsequent pages as you scroll down
• When you do need to switch to classic (which should be infrequent now) you will see ~10x improvement in load time as the request has been pre-loaded, caching the authentication which was what drove the long load times
• Solution objects are cached by solution and by object list, so you can navigate between solutions and between object lists in a solution and still see great performance
• Lists of items will check for new objects in the background as you move around the experience to avoid blocking, adding any newly found objects to the view as they are discovered

The post Managing solutions has a new look (public preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Under the gear icon in the header of maker portal, you’ll now find a link to ‘Developer resources’ which lists the environment unique names and IDs, as well as links to the API and discovery endpoints. There are also links to further documentation, feeds and samples.

Want to learn more about Developer resources for Power Apps?   Be sure and check out these other resources:

• Community Power Apps Developer forum
• Dataverse developer
• Model-driven apps developer
• Canvas apps developer

The post Power Apps Developer resources appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Please check any bookmarks you might be using and switch them over to the new links below. We will enable redirection for the next few months to make sure links don’t break, however updating this links now will make sure they do not fail for you in the future.

No port numbers will change with this update, just the URLs.

¹ Except web.powerapps.com/environments/<environmentId>/apps/<appId> which will be hosted at apps.powerapps.com

The post Update your bookmarks for web.powerapps.com appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.