3 Easy To Implement Tips That’ll Improve Your Power Apps Development Speed

In this article, we’re going to explain three simple tips to improve your Power Apps development speed. Power Apps is actually a great tool for implementing applications across your organization. There are a couple of different types of users who will use Power Apps.  And they are ultimately going to care about either speed or the quality of the applications that are being built.

On one hand, you have the citizen developer who is probably developing something that is in support of their 9 to 5 job, but they’re not really in a development role with their company. They’re just making a process better or automating something for their team. And ultimately, they need to get back to their day job. So speed is important to them.

The other set of users are maybe your I.T. department or your marketing team. The would ultimately care about brand consistency and the user experience for the employees.

And so those are the two main groups that Microsoft Power Apps focus on.

These three pointers we have shared can be used to speed up power apps development, reduce frustration for a newbie developer, and ultimately create a more consistent and better user experience for advanced app development by an organization.

How To Improve Power Apps Development Speed

#1 Making use of Components

First, we will look at leveraging components to speed up the development of your power apps as well as to create consistency within your application and across your company. If you’ve used power apps before, you’ve probably gotten into the situation where you need to create the same control multiple times and have it look the same. And so to do that, you may have used the good old copy-paste method or maybe you’ve even created a separate screen or a library of controls, if you will, to copy-paste from within your application.

But if you’re using this technique to implement a header or footer, let’s say, in your application and your copy-pasting that header across all of the screens in your application, there is a better way. And that’s the component.

So you can actually leverage the component to build your header and it becomes your own control that you can then repeat within your application. And once you’ve actually put that header in all of the screens in your application, the really great thing about that is you can go back into the component itself and make an additional change, like adding secondary text or even changing the application name.

And that modification will actually take place in all of your screens where that header component is being used.

#2 Applying Global Styles with Power Apps

In the second tip to improve Power Apps development speed, we want to look at applying global styles within the power apps application. So now that we’re using a component for our header, we want to figure out how to apply the change in color or theme. If that should need to take place for application. So one of the ways that we can apply this is we can actually do this through the OnStart function, where we can define things like primary text color, secondary text color, fill color, background, color, and things like that.

But there is one hurdle to overcome with components, and that is unlike controls where all of these properties are readily available to us and we can apply from variables that we set an app on start. We don’t have the same luxury with components, but what we do have for components is something called parameters. And so the key thing really in defining branding or global styles for our components is defining what are the things that we want to impact. So maybe it’s as simple as primary text color and fills color or primary text color and secondary text color.

And so we would simply define those things, for example, as parameters linking them to our variables and our app on start to then apply those changes across all of our components within the application. In addition to any other controls that are referencing variables in-app OnStart.

#3 Using Component Libraries

In our third tip today, we want to talk about using component libraries to improve power apps development speed. So now that you have a component, your first component built. We want to be able to expose that component or publish it for other power apps developers within the organization.

This will help speed up their development as well as to improve consistency overall in the applications deployed within your organization.

In order to do this, we mention the recommended approach, and that is to use component libraries. And so in addition to, you know, not only speeding up development and providing power apps developers with access to rich resources or components that have already been developed for them in a consistent way.

There are additional benefits to component libraries, some of which are things like versioning and allowing users, power apps developers to be notified when an update is made to a particular component so that they can appropriately deal with any of those changes within the applications that they’ve developed.

We’re going to be digging deeper into each of these topics in the future.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about power apps development speed, feel free to comment below and we will answer it for you.