Tag Archives: Forms

PowerApps and SharePoint–Top X Wish List

Someone told me that it’s a good idea to always have a ‘top X’ things you’d fix, add, or change in a product. I first posted my PowerApps and SharePoint wish list about a year ago.
Top X Things Needed to Make PowerApps Awesome for SharePoint 

Since last time

  • Embedded forms have been introduced.
  • SharePoint Online now supports customizing SharePoint list forms by using PowerApps. It’s a pretty awesome improvement. Still a ‘step one’, but a pretty huge step.
  • The other two things I mentioned are still on the list and reframed a bit below.

The New List

  1. Full fidelity for complex field types – The more I use PowerApps, the more I want to be able to use the SharePoint column types that we’re using in many of our lists. Namely Option columns and Lookup columns. At the moment there are stumbling blocks in PowerApps when using these fields and things like GroupBy. PowerApps just doesn’t recognize the data in the way we need it to… yet.
    True, there are work-arounds for some use-cases, but the fewer of these we need to deal with going forward, the better. Because this actually hampers some development I’ve moved it to the top of my list.
  2. PowerApps Web Part – In order for users to have a good experience when in SharePoint and using PowerApps, it’s got to be smooth. Right now it’s still very ‘jerky’ when in SharePoint and opening an app… “hold on while we load up this other thing…”.
    As I stated in the original post, this is critical for SharePoint ‘view’ replacements.
    Yes, we have iframes as a work around. That’s ‘OK’ but just now how smoothly integrated it should be in my opinion.
  3. When creating an app from the SharePoint interface give us layout options rather than defaulting to the phone layout. Definitely realize this was a ‘first step’ and are grateful for it, but time to take the next step. This will also be a big deal once a PowerApps web part (see #1) is ready.
    Workaround: Yes, you can do this when starting from scratch in PowerApps, but you lose out on the gains of using the wizard.
  4. From SharePoint: Create an app from a SharePoint view.
  5. From PowerApps: Create an app from a SharePoint view. Seems like these would be the same thing, but because it’s actually the integration of two products there’s work that needs to be done on both sides for this to work. When choosing a data source it currently gets you down to the list level – ‘just’ need to extend one more level down to selecting a view. (I say ‘just’ but fully realize there’s a LOT of work behind the scenes to make this happen – keep it up engineers!!).

Other items

More things in no particular order:

  1. Keep improving PowerApps forms for SharePoint. Wizards, better UX, or whatever it takes to make this both easier for power users (non-dev). Great start – really, I don’t want to sound ungrateful – it’s awesome. Just keep improving on it. 
    1. Improve forms UX for (non-dev) power users.
    2. Make forms available for anonymous and external users. This works for SharePoint, but not the PowerApps forms quite yet (I assume this is at least in part because PowerApps itself is not available to non-tenant users).
  2. I don’t have a good name for this one, but essentially a ‘code view’ and search.
    Ex. When creating an app from SharePoint it creates a nice 3 screen app with a search baked in. If you delete the Search box, a number of other controls break because they have references to the Search control. It would be nice to have visibility within the PowerApps Studio to where formulas reference a control so makers can update references.
  3. PowerApps forms available in the SharePoint mobile app
  4. Responsive (Canvas) PowerApps. Sounds like the model-driven apps will be responsive. When will we get the same responsive options in SharePoint forms and canvas apps?

The list will continue to evolve…

Top X Things Needed To Make PowerApps Awesome for SharePoint

While chatting about PowerApps recently, someone told me that I should always know my ‘top x’ things I want fixed, added, changed, etc. I can see where that might be handy to talk about with Microsoft, with other implementers, etc. It’s a quickly changing community and product and hey, they *are* listening. For PowerApps my current focus is on how it integrates with SharePoint. With that in mind, here’s my top 2. I’ll come up with more later. These are the ones I think are *really* important. 

  1. Embedded
  2. Embedded

PowerApps has great potential and already has a running start. But it has to nail the embedded story. If the integration of SharePoint and PowerApps is going to be *really* successful and gain the love of SharePoint users it needs to be easy and seamless. That means when a user selects a PowerApp in SharePoint it’s not going to jump to another application. It needs to run within the SharePoint interface.

So why do I list ‘embedded’ twice? Not because I really, really want it (I do) – but because there are (at least) two distinct embedded use cases:

Embedded Forms

EVERYONE has been talking about forms – which is well and good. They should be talking. They should (and have) been yelling. The gap is obvious and a solution is WAY overdue. With the scheduled end of InfoPath and the rudely unscheduled end of SharePoint Designer’s (SPD) visual designer, users have been left with one of the community’s longest and most obvious gaps. Thanks to third-party offerings (K2, Nintex, etc.) and community-efforts (Stratus Forms, etc.) certain needs have been met, but there are still gaps and it’s been far too long for a Microsoft-sponsored solution for business and power users.

Note: I don’t want this coming off as an anti-Microsoft rant. That is definitely not my intent. There were plenty of reasons for the delay. What they want to do and need to do is not trivial and the standards are extremely high. The integration we’re talking about also requires collaboration (see what I did there?) between two separate, complex, and rapidly changing products and teams. The PowerApps and SharePoint teams are also in different reporting structures within Microsoft. Fortunately both teams understand how important it is to get this particular integration done. The good thing is that there are many indications that this time around they’re going to make it – and maybe even exceed your expectations.

PowerApps needs to be able to replace existing SharePoint forms – the standard New, Edit, and Display forms – as well as add additional forms to a list or library. Form editing needs to be easy and intuitive in terms of which fields are displayed, how fields are laid out and formatted. Beyond that, there are plenty of other features we’d love to see, but the ones listed here are the core. Talk to anyone that’s used InfoPath or SPD and you’ll quickly get a list of wanted features.

We have every indication that Forms and the embedded experience will be addressed. Microsoft has gone as far as announcing that PowerApps IS the replacement for InfoPath. It is important to remember however that the features are coming iteratively, little by little, but continuously. So be patient.

Embedded Views

The embedded story that folks aren’t talking about as much is for Views. SharePoint views have historically been a powerful tool for business users. And while they are powerful out of the box, power users continue to find that they’d like to extend views beyond the out of box capabilities, and extend without involving developers when they are able.

Again, power users were once able to do some limited, yet still extremely useful, view customizations with SPD, but lost that power with the deprecation of the designer view. For the last few years, some customizations were again available using Client-Side Rendering (CSR) and the JS Link property of web parts. While extremely flexible, this approach was beyond most typical business users as it crept into a grey area between out of the box and ‘real’ customization and development. The approach never gained mainstream support or adoption. Now, as O365 continues to mature and lock down features that have the capability to jeopardize platform stability, CSR and JS Link are also going away from fringe power users and exclusively back into the hands of developers (good for the platform, unfortunate for those that were using it). 

Users need a way to get the benefit of SharePoint views, specifically choosing a list of fields, the order of the fields in a grid or spreadsheet format, the filter for the list of items, and how they are sorted. Once those core features are available they’re going to want the ability to customize that view using PowerApps’ ability to change field formats, apply conditional formatting, and other rules.

PowerApps today are surfaced in O365 SharePoint Online via the view dropdown.

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Selecting one of them initiates the loading of a PowerApp, but only give the user a button to open the PowerApp – opening the client application.

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Embedding the PowerApp would (hopefully) spin up a PowerApp right in the SharePoint window – just like any other view – rather than having to launch a client application – which is a fairly jarring experience for users.

I think there’s some interest in this use-case in the community, but it’s definitely less discussed than the forms example. I’m not sure what the interest level is, but I imagine anyone that was doing CSR and JS Link work would be interested in it. We’ll just have to wait and see.

#3 – A View Template

OK. So I did think of a third item on my list.

The current SharePoint template for PowerApps starts with a SharePoint list and creates a series of three forms in PowerApps. It would be great is there was a PowerApps template that took the selection a step further – into the current views for a list (or library) – and had a default layout that looks more like a traditional SharePoint view – a table/grid layout. This feature alone would allow SharePoint users to leverage their existing investment in views straight into extending them in the PowerApps interface. 

Summary

PowerApps is a powerful addition to the suite of tools Microsoft is making available for power users – many of which are currently using SharePoint. The PowerApps team wants to see user adoption grow and has a large group of potential users in the existing SharePoint user base – and SharePoint folks are an eager bunch. We’re already intrigued by the potential PowerApps brings to the table. If Microsoft is able to smoothly embed PowerApps into SharePoint (and Teams!) pages, users will be chomping at the bit to use PowerApps (and Flow) even faster than they already are.