By Dave Godschalx, Solution Consultant, Dynamics4Business, April 18, 2024
Just over a year ago, on February 2, 2023, Microsoft announced the Public Preview of a refreshed look and feel for Model-Driven Apps. Shortly afterward, on March 29 of the same year, Canvas apps followed. Over the past year, a lot has happened, and several of the Modern Controls are now generally available. This makes it a great moment to pause and reflect on these developments and take a look at what else lies ahead.
Why Modern Controls in Canvas apps?
Power Apps allows users to build apps using controls. These include a label control to display text, a gallery to display table information and a button to invoke actions. Since the introduction of Power Apps in 2016, the look and feel of these controls has barely changed.
Modern Controls are a new set of controls based on the Microsoft Fluent 2 design and should provide an easier and faster experience for app creators and a more consistent experience for end users.
Time saving
Modern Controls was created with simplicity and productivity in mind for app makers. This is well reflected in many aspects of Modern Controls. For example, there is an out-of-the-box header control that eliminates the need to re-develop a header for each app.
The table control is fully responsive by default, and buttons can be given a different layout simply by indicating that it is a primary or secondary button. These are some of many advantages that Modern Controls offer in terms of time savings over traditional controls.
Themes
Modern Controls currently already offers a number of default selectable themes that allow apps to have a layout similar to Office 365 applications, Teams or SharePoint. In total, there are 6 default themes and simple custom themes can also be created where a font and color palette can be chosen based on one's corporate identity.
With the use of themes, it is no longer necessary to adjust all the properties of each component individually. Adjustments are made at the theme level after which all components in the app receive a consistent layout. However, it is still possible to deviate from the set theme for each component.
Table control
One of the most impressive new controls is the table control. This control returns a fully responsive view of table data similar to a view from a Model Driven app. The table control has the ability to change the order of columns and users can sort the data as they are used to in Model Driven Apps. Getting all this done with a classic gallery control is a difficult and time-consuming task so that makes the new table control a very nice addition.
Validations
All input fields have a property called “ValidationState” that allows significant improvement in error management. When an entered value does not pass validation, this can easily be presented to the end user by coloring the field red using the ValidationState. This way it is always clear which input field causes the problem and it is no longer necessary to develop this yourself in the Power App.
In addition to new variants of already existing controls, a number of new controls have also been introduced and several additional controls will be added in the coming months. In addition to the header and table controls already mentioned, the following controls are new:
- Link: allows the presentation of a URL. With classic controls, a label or button was frequently used for this purpose, which was then transformed into a link using styling.
- Progression bar: a horizontal bar that can show progression by further coloring the bar.
- Tab list: allows you to add tabs to a screen/form.
- Badge: a small circular representation of a text reduced to 2 letters. In Teams, for example, you see a badge for users without a profile image. First name Last name then is shown as VA. This is a useful addition in responsive designs on narrow screens.
- Information button: a small button behind which an information text can be hidden.
- Spinner: a loading icon that can be presented when the app is performing operations.
- Number input: an input field with a plus and minus button for numeric values.
In addition to the already introduced controls, a number of interesting controls have already been announced including the dialog, toolbar, video stream and fluent icons.
General Available
As of November 2023, a small number of the controls are no longer available in preview but General Available. In addition, the setting to activate Modern Controls has been moved from the upcoming features section to the general settings. The Button, Slider, Link, Progression Bar and Tab list controls are already General Available at the time of writing and other controls will follow incrementally in the coming period. Weekly updates may occur and controls that are general available will continue to be developed.
Experienced app makers will still be missing some properties at this time that they did have with the classic controls. However, Microsoft has already promised that layout properties such as Fill, Padding, Align, and Border related properties will soon be available for all controls. There will also be completely new properties for controls that are already generally available such as an icon property for the button control (finally).
Design
The most obvious change to Modern Controls is the updated design. Power Apps look a bit dated by default and differ in design from other Microsoft products such as Office 365, Teams and Dynamics 365. The Modern Controls put an end to this. With the new Modern Controls, apps regain a modern look and also a recognizable design without requiring much development time.
What is next?
Development of Modern Controls will continue for the foreseeable future. Updates may be rolled out weekly, which Microsoft will then post a monthly blog post about. More useful controls will be added in the coming months and controls already introduced will be further developed until eventually all new functionality is generally available.
Applying Power Apps in your organization
If after reading this blog you have gained inspiration for app development or other types of business automation, you can always contact us so that the experts at Dynamics4Business can further help you take your organization to the next level.
Whether you have ideas you'd like to explore or concrete challenges you'd like to discuss, we'd be happy to meet you. Call us at +31 (0)85 303 86 60 or fill in the contact form on the site.