Setting up data sources, defining business process flows, creating user interfaces; all these tasks are pieces of an application-building process. These pieces come together to accomplish one main goal: to build a solution that solves a specific need.

One of the things you need to consider is the maintainability of your app. Whether fixing bugs or adding new features, using best practices is always a good idea. No matter your technology, well-documented code is easier to maintain.

Even though Power Apps is a low-code platform, you must consider certain things before building applications. Like any other developer team, you need to establish code standards. These standards allow your team to be more productive by setting predefined patterns for variable naming, control usage, and coding methodology.

Variable naming

Proper naming gives your developers instant insight into the scope of your variables. For example, if a variable name prefix starts with lcl (short for local), it means its value will only be available on the current screen. On the other hand, using gbl (short for global) means that this variable is accessible across the whole application.

These examples might seem trivial, but if another developer needs to maintain your app or if your app serves as a template for other apps in your organization, setting these patterns from the start can help the application-building process and maintainability.

Control usage

One of the vital elements of an application’s success is performance. If an application is slow to start or takes several seconds to perform a task, it hurts user adoption.

Here are a couple of examples of this:

• A great-looking app that uses many controls to build its user interface but hurts performance each time the screens get rendered.
• Displaying data to the user using a gallery inside a gallery. This approach might be tempting to present master-detail data, but this would be a significant slowdown in your application.

To avoid this, you need to learn the performance points of your platform. In Power Apps, one of the main recommendations for improving responsiveness is to reduce the number of controls.

Coding methodology

This concept describes a set of rules to regulate the development process in a low-code team. Your solution infrastructure can also help you make an informed decision on how to build your application:

• If you have data that rarely changes, you can create collections to avoid round-trips each time data is required. Even more, if you have data that never changes, you can import this as static data inside your app for speedier access.
• Taking advantage of the features available in your data source can significantly improve your application performance. For example, when using Dataverse or a relational database, there is a significant difference when querying data if you use data source views instead of building the actual query in your application logic, especially if it needs complex relationships. Using these views gives you cleaner code while also enhancing performance. This improvement relies on the data source engine as it is the one that executes the data processing instead of the application itself.

These are examples of practices you can coordinate with your team when building apps. For a detailed list of best practices, please refer to https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/powerapps-canvas-app-coding-standards-and-guidelines/

Tracking processes is a necessity for customers everywhere. As in any development process, the first step is to gather all the requirements needed to fulfill the business need; this will then help us design the data structure to support our application.

As for the data source, this recipe will set up the required fields in a SharePoint list while also applying certain settings to make it as performant as it should be.

Getting ready

Before diving into developing solutions with Power Apps, you will need a Microsoft 365 subscription. Please refer to the Preface section for suggestions on getting a playground to build your apps.

We will use SharePoint as the data source for this recipe, so we will start by creating a list. The actual list creation process is pretty straightforward, leaving plenty of time for our application design.

SharePoint Online performance considerations

When working with SharePoint Online, you need to remember that we are working on a web application with specific response and performance levels to provide the best user experience. To meet this, Microsoft has set a view threshold of 5,000 elements per list. Even though a list can hold up to 30 million items, querying data exceeding this limit will result in platform errors, making the list unresponsive.

These are a few recommendations to keep your lists performant:

• Set an index for the columns you wish to filter. Remember to do this beforehand since you cannot change it if you have exceeded the threshold.
• Prepare views for lists that might carry a large number of items by segment. Examples can be categories, years, and departments.
• Build your views with fewer than 12 People, Lookup, or Managed metadata fields to avoid performance issues.

For reference on this subject, check out the following links:

• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/manage-large-lists-and-libraries-in-sharepoint-b8588dae-9387-48c2-9248-c24122f07c59
• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-filtering-to-modify-a-sharepoint-view-3d8efc52-0808-4731-8f9b-3dfaeacea3d4

How to do it…

1. Go to your SharePoint site. We will need to create two lists.
2. Select + New and then List. This action will open a dialog with several list templates for you to select. Click on Blank list, input Clients as the Name, leave the Description field blank, and click on Create. This action will create a list with a default structure:

Figure 1.1: List creation procedure

3. To add and update columns, click on the gear icon in the top-right corner and select List settings. This action will open all the configuration options for this list, but we will be focusing on the Columns section.
4. First, click on the Title column to edit it. We are doing this for user interface reasons. This field lets you open the selected record quickly from the list view, so we will set it as the client’s name. Once it opens, rename the column name to Name and click OK.
5. To add the rest of the fields, click Create column and set the column name and type as seen in the following table:

Table 1.1: Clients list columns

6. When adding the Address column, specify the type of text to be Plain text to prevent formatting issues later when designing your app. We need to make this change because, otherwise, SharePoint will store this data in HTML to maintain the formatting and will make the text look different from the rest of the app.
7. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the Incidents list. Rename the Title column to Incident and set the columns as seen in the following table:

   Column name	Column data type	Required
   Incident	Single line of text	Yes
   Customer Name	Lookup	Yes
   Date	Date and Time	Yes
   Priority	Choice	Yes
   Comments	Multiple lines of text	No

   Table 1.2: Incident list columns

   The Choice type means that it will use a list of items to choose from, and the Lookup type indicates that this column will link to another list that holds another set of data. In this case, we will use this column to relate the incidents to the clients.

8. To add the Customer Name column, select the Lookup type and from the Get information from dropdown, choose the Clients list we created before. Leave the rest of the options as the default.
9. For the Priority column, select the Choice type and replace the choices with High, Medium, and Low. Set the Default value as Low
10. Lastly, change the text type to Plain text for the Comments column.

Now that we have our lists in place, let’s see how this list and its relationships come together.

How it works…

After setting up our data source, we can now start entering some test data to use in our app.

1. Click on the gear icon in the top-right corner, select Site contents, and select the Clients list:

Figure 1.2: Site contents option

2. Now, let’s click on + New to add some random test data:
   • Name: Yennu Enterprises
   • Address: One Yennu road
   • Phone: +1 555 800 5555
   • Email: sales@yennu.com
3. Add as much data as you like. Repeat the same steps with the Incidents list by clicking on the gear icon and selecting the list from Site contents.
4. For Customer Name, you will see data loaded from the Clients list, and the Priority column will let you choose from the previously defined elements:
   • Incident: Failure in the programming of the executive elevator
   • Customer Name: Yennu Enterprises (link)
   • Date: 11/17/2020
   • Priority: High
   • Comments: The elevator returns itself to the last floor when idle.
5. Again, add as much data as you want. And now, we are moving forward to the next section, where we will build an app from this data structure.