PL-100 Microsoft Power Platform App Maker – Create model-driven apps – charts, dashboards, card forms and business rules Part 2

3. Using dashboards in our model-driven app

So what can we do with all of this? Well, if I click on dashboards here, we can see that I’ve got lots of different dashboards. I’m not going to select them all. Instead, I’m just going to select the classic dashboard and the multistream and the interactive single stream. Now, by doing that, it quite often adds additional entities. So I need to click on the entity and remove it. The expense here, I have these two dashboards, and I’m going to say I want to allow the user to have a choice of either of them. So I’m going to save this, and then I’m going to go into the site map.

Now, in the site map under this group, I want to add another sub area. So this is something that you can click on, and this sub area is going to be a dashboard. So I’m going to call it dashboard, and it’s going to say, okay, which dashboard do you want to start with? So this is the start, not the end. So the end user will be able to go through all of the different dashboards you’ve got selected. So I’m going to say I’m going to have the classic dashboard at the beginning, going to save and close. Now you notice save is not there. I quite like to save rather than save and close and then publish.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into dashboard and make a minor change. I just deselected all and then reselected all. So then I’ll save, I can validate. Now, the warning is that account doesn’t reference a formal view, so they’ll see all forms of views. So if you’re okay with that, that’s fine. Publish and notice it says how many dependencies these dashboards require. And then if I want to see them, here are all of the different required components.

And then play, right, so I’m playing. So I’ll go into expenses, and you can see there’s a dashboard there. I click on dashboard, and there is my classic dashboard, my interactive single stream dashboard, and my multistream. Now, you may notice a lot of these say no data available. That’s because of the date range. If I change the date range to this quarter here, we can see something.

So I can click on individual items, get information about them. I can go to these graphs and say, oh, 1937, I want more information on that. Click. And this is the more information on that. So it is these particular items so I can clear all.

And then I’ve got ten active expenses. Click here are the ten active expenses. So that’s my interactive single stream, my multistream. So again, if I change what I’ve got here to this quarter, here are the things that I’ve got for my active expenses. Here’s my classic dashboard. So we can see, we got views as well as charts. And then if I go into expenses, I’ve got open dashboards over here. And if I click on open dashboards, then I can see my two dashboards again.

Need to actually change what’s there in terms of the time frame. Now, if you have a problem seeing these dashboards, which I did for a while, I couldn’t get the right dashboards to appear. Then a quick solution for that appears to be go down to solutions and click on publish all customizations. So it takes a few minutes, but sometimes it seems that creating these dashboards, the computer doesn’t keep track of what dashboards to show until and unless they’re published. And that seemed to just clear the logjam. Since I did that, then I’ve created these dashboards. And you see, I didn’t need to go to that published all customizations.

But if you do have a problem like I did, then just go down to solutions and publish all customizations. Now incidentally, if you’re wondering where all of the charts are with the table dashboard, all you can see are these streams or views. Well, what you need to do is click on show visual filter and there we can see all of these charts. If this is too much information, well, you can switch to tau view. And so that just shows a figure. If you click on open views, that will get you back to the views from the dashboards, so you can go in between views and dashboards.

So in this video, we have created dashboards relating to a specific table. So here we’ve created two dashboards for this table, and you can see that we can use them when we go to a particular entity view and we can open up the dashboards. We have also created some interactive dashboards and some classic dashboards. So if I go back to this dashboard, you can see how we created them there.

And we went to the site map and we added a sub area which was of a dashboard type. And then we said what we wanted the default dashboard to be. But remember, the app designer itself says what dashboards the end user will have access to. So this is how you create and configure and use dashboards.

4. Using card forms in the Classic interface

In this video, we’re going to have a look at these, the Active Expenses in the all accounts. Now these are streams in the dashboard. The streams are if I add another one based on a view, so we have got a view called Active Expenses. And if I go back to the tables, data tables, this is the PowerApps portal. You can see we have a view of Active Expenses and there’s only one item in there. The reason for that is because there is a filter just here. We’ll be looking at filters later on in the next video. So if I change this filter, you can see that we have got ten items here.

If I go to this view and click on it, you will see that we’ve got the ten items there. However, this representation here, this view is not what we can see here. What we can see here is a form, specifically a card form based on that view. So what happens if I want to change this? You can see for instance, we can have more detail if we so wished. Well, to do that, we go away from the view and we go into a form, a card form. So you can see here we have a card form for information. Now, when I click this, then you can see we go into the classic designer. The reason for this.

The new designer at the moment cannot support card forms. But have a look at what we’ve got. Right at the top we’ve got the status reason. So you can see that right up there, active. Then that’s in the header. Then in the details we’ve got the ID. So that’s the ID number. And then in the footer we’ve got the owner and the created on. So where is a footer? It’s this drop arrow.

So if I click on this you can see the owner and created on. So let’s now turn to this card view and say, okay, what I want to do is add more things to either the header, the details or the footer. Now, I don’t want the ID to be in the details, I want it to be in the photo. So I’m just going to drag it up there. What I want in the details, I want the expense value and I’ll just drag it in the description, the date of expense. And in the footer I want the account as opposed to the owner. So let’s get rid of the owner. So I can’t drag it off like this. I just have to press either delete or remove.

But you can see the field you are trying to remove is acquired by the system or business. So I can’t actually do that for everything. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to save this and then once it’s saved, I can publish. Now, there are some additional things you can do, but very little you can see change properties is largely disabled. It depends on what you’re clicking on. Form properties that just shows the name and the description. So you see a card form for this entity, so entity read table. So really it is just the field information and you’ve got the separate things, header details and footer. You’ve also got a color strip. So the color strip that is this on the left hand side.

So for you to add anything into color strip it would have to be a series of choices. So let’s put the approval status in there, which is to do with choices. All right, so I’m going to save it and I’m going to publish it. So publishing customization. So as you can see, so let’s go back in and refresh this. And here you can see the differences. So we have now got the status reason and the ID both at the top and I’ll just change this filter so you can see more information. So up to date we’ll be fine. On the left hand side we have got the color strip. Well, this just happens to be the one color the approval status hasn’t changed in any of these. But then in the detail we’ve got the expense value, the description and where applicable, the date. And then in the footer we have the additional things that we’ve asked for.

So we have got the account. So if you want to modify the data behind this then that would be selecting a different view or creating a new view. If you want to modify how it actually looks then that would be going into the card form and then altering that. And you do that using the classic environment. And basically you have a header which goes to the top, details which are in the middle and then footer which is hidden away.