Archive for May, 2018

Building a Modern SharePoint Solution: Part 1 – Preparing SharePoint

Today I want to start a new series around PowerApps and Flow and building out an entire solution that utilizes both of these tools.  Until recently, PowerApps was a separate application from SharePoint.  It could be attached to a list, but you were still limited to it being outside of the platform.  That all changed in the last quarter of 2017 (at least for those on first release).  If you are first release and using the new SharePoint list UI, then you can now build your forms in PowerApps like we used to with InfoPath (and some still do 🙁 ) and use them in place of the default SharePoint list forms.  This means you can now make your user interface nicer to use and add logic without having to utilize code, an outdated tool or pay for a more expensive tool to do that for you.  If you have licensing in O365, you have PowerApps and Flow available to you.  In this first post I am going to discuss the requirements and prepare SharePoint.  In the next post in the series show you how to integrate and build out your form for the solution.  Then we’ll add some logic and customizations to the form.  Once that’s done, we’ll bring out Flow and automate the processes behind the scenes.  Just a quick note, this series is designed to do as much OOTB as possible so some other logical enhancements like using other control types instead of the default data cards will be demonstrated in future posts.

Posts in this series:

Read more

Building a Modern SharePoint Solution: Part 3 – Customizations All List Form PowerApps Should Have

In this third post in my series on modern SharePoint solutions, I will cover customizing PowerApp forms to meet the requirements of the business.  We’ll first start off with some basic customizations that need to be done for most form integrations.  When I started to write this post I initially had planned to discuss the modifications you should make for all and then move on to the custom modifications for the solution requirements.  The “default mods” quickly filled up this post, so I have moved the custom mods to the next one.

Posts in this series:

Read more

Building a Modern SharePoint Solution: Part 5 – Cascading Drop-down Lists and People Picker in PowerApps

This is going to be the last PowerApp based post in this series.  After this, I will be moving on to completing the solution with Microsoft Flow.  In this post, I will show you how to create cascading drop-down lists in PowerApps.  This corresponds to the requirement in my first post: “Ability to select from a list of approvers based on the project or event.”  This was something that could be done in InfoPath, but it was a LOT of steps.  In PowerApps, cascading drop-downs are actually pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it.  I, however, decided to do the hardest type of cascading drop-down there is with regards to SharePoint. Building a drop-down around a regular field is nice and easy; cascading drop-downs to select a person\group value is much more difficult.

Posts in this series:

 

Read more