Today we are presenting you a new feature in preview that is not a feature itself. Rather, it is a solution that can be added to our Power Platform environments and that adds functionality and components to the existing ones. This solution is intended to provide a series of help components to developers to be able to create their applications in a faster and easier way, and at the same time it provides test tools to be able to check in a very intuitive way if these components adjust to our requirements.
We are going to analyze the necessary requirements, how to install the solution and we are going to detail the characteristics of each of its components.
Prerequisites
First, you need to enable the Power Apps component framework for canvas apps. To do this we will follow the following steps:
1. Sign in to PowerApps
2. Select Settings and go to the Administration Center
3. In the Environments tab select our environment
4. Go to Settings
5. In the Products tab select features
6. Enable Power Apps component framework for canvas apps
7. Select Save
Importing the Creator Kit solution
In order to use this feature, the corresponding solution must be installed in the PowerPlatform environment that we want.
Go to the chosen PowerPlatform environment
Download the solution using this link: https://aka.ms/creatorkitdownload
Import the downloaded solution into our environment
The components included in the Kit are listed in the following link:
If you want to investigate the code of this solution you can go to the Github source:
Creator Kit Components
The Creator Kit contains the following components:
Applications
Component Library
Custom controls
Let's play!
Creator Kit Reference App
First of all we find a new application called Creator Kit Reference App.
If we open this application we see that it provides us with information about all the features of the Creator Kit.
If we click on any of the features on the left panel we can:
Test that controller
See how it behaves when the user interacts with it
Get advantages and disadvantages of its use
Best practices to use it
Code it runs on
All of these components are available for use in building applications.
Fluent Theme Designer
This application allows us to create a custom theme to later be applied to a PowerApps application.
First of all, we modify the colors that we want to show in the different positions of the application using the controls on the left. We understand as primary color that color with which the most visual controls of the application are identified: default action buttons, selected checkboxes, attention zones, etc.
Once the colors have been changed, we see how in the central part of the application we have a demo of how it would look with those selected colors. In this way we get an idea of the visualization of the application for users.
Once we have the color combination clear, we click on Export Theme and we will see that it generates a JSON structure:
As the instruction says, we just have to paste this code in the OnStart property of the application we want and that color combination will be applied automatically to all its screens. In this way we can control the color palette of all our controls without having to go one by one. And in case you want to change it, it will only be necessary to change it in one place.
Canvas Template
This application is intended as an aid for creating applications. It is made up of an empty screen and another with a multitude of controls implemented and preloaded, and in turn linked to a loaded JSON theme. This allows you to easily create any screen by copying the preloaded controls, without having to make them from scratch and configure them.
The available controls are all the new ones that the Creator Kit incorporates and in turn we can see how their visibility will be on the screen.
New components
As we have seen in the section about the new features that the Creator Kit brings, the new controls are accessible from the Custom menu of our PowerApps. This allows us to add these controls in the applications already created or new ones that we are going to create.
The components included in the Kit are listed in the following link:
Conclusions
As we have seen, it is a solution that provides many new functionalities and also provides us with tools to be able to test these components before using them in final applications.
Even so, being a previous version it is possible that there are controls that don't finish working or some bugs appear. That is why the collaboration and the report of everything that does not finish working correctly is appreciated. We can even contribute new ideas to include them in the final version. All this from the Github repository discussed above in the Issues section.
I hope you liked the post and that in these remaining days of summer it gives you time to try and play with these elements. Happy summer!