Learning Microsoft Power Apps

Chapter 8. Canvas App Controls and Features

In the last two chapters, you learned about model-driven app features that come standard as well as various extensibility options to design business applications. Model-driven apps are the best fit to design process-driven, data-model-driven apps, but they are not advised for designing mobile applications that require highly customizable user interfaces, or where you need to store data in a location other than Dataverse.

In this case, you’ll want to design a canvas app. In this chapter, you’ll learn about a variety of canvas app out-of-the-box features along with various extensibility options to meet complex business requirements.

It’s important to know that the canvas app can also use Dataverse as its primary data source to store the business data. If you do so, then all the Dataverse features that run the business logic on the server side like plug-ins, custom APIs, workflows, business rules, and security roles will also be applicable for your canvas app. However, canvas apps don’t support model-driven, app-specific UI components, such as business process flows, dashboards, custom pages, charts, site maps, forms, command bars, editable subgrids, and so on.

Figure 8-1 shows that a canvas app can be designed using only its many built-in features and controls, but if the built-in features do not meet your requirements, then you can create custom controls using PCF components.

Figure 8-1. Canvas app components and features

As discussed ...