Ultimate Suite For Powerbuilder

[Bran Cardello]

PowerApps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors, as well as a data platform, that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. Using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).

Apps built using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business operations into digital, automated processes. What's more, apps built using Power Apps have a responsive design and can run seamlessly in browser and on mobile devices (phone or tablet). Power Apps "democratizes" the business-app-building experience by enabling users to create feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.

Power Apps also provides an extensible platform that lets pro developers programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.

Power Apps Studio is the app designer used for building canvas apps. The app designer makes creating apps feel more like building a slide deck in Microsoft PowerPoint. More information: Generate an app from data

Power Apps administrators can use the Power Platform admin center (admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com) to create and manage environments, view Dataverse analytics, and get real-time, self-help recommendations and support for Power Apps and Power Automate. More information: Administer Power Platform

Developers are app makers who can write code to extend business app creation and customization. Developers can use code to create data and metadata, apply server-side logic using Azure functions, plug-ins, and workflow extensions, apply client-side logic using JavaScript, integrate with external data using virtual entities and webhooks, build custom connectors, and embed apps into your website experiences to create integrated solutions. More information:

Dynamics 365 apps (such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Marketing) also use the underlying Dataverse platform used by Power Apps to store and secure data. This enables you to build apps using Power Apps and Dataverse directly against your core business data already used within Dynamics 365, without the need for integration. More information: Dynamics 365 and Dataverse

You can build Power Apps for free. Simply sign in to Power Apps. For more information, go to Sign in to Power Apps for the first time. Initially, you'll have access to the default environment. You can build in your own developer environment with Dataverse by signing up for the Power Apps Developer Plan.

Power Apps US Government consists of several plans designed for US government organizations to address the unique and evolving requirements of the United States public sector. The Power Apps GCC environment provides compliance with federal requirements for cloud services, including FedRAMP High, DoD DISA IL2, and requirements for criminal justice systems (CJI data types). More information: Power Apps US Government

Power Apps is a suite of Microsoft products that enable both developers and nontechnical users to build custom applications to fulfill various business needs. The Power Apps suite includes a variety of applications, services and connectors, as well as a data platform, which together create a rapid app development environment requiring little to no coding expertise to use.

Power Apps is a popular suite of low-code services used to build business apps. In addition to low-code/no-code app development, the platform combines self-service analytics and automation. The Microsoft Azure cloud hosts the Power Apps application suite that can use enterprise data stored on a singular data platform such as Microsoft Dataverse or in various data sources such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 or Microsoft SQL Server. Application programming interfaces (APIs) enable such data connections.

Developers can use the Power Apps platform to programmatically interact with underlying data and metadata and integrate it with external data. They can also apply business logic and create custom connectors as required.

Microsoft rolled out Power Apps in late 2015 as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. The platform and development tools make it possible for nontechnical users to create, manage and share business apps with ease, simplifying and accelerating the app-building process by enabling any user to build a feature-rich, customized app without writing code.

The Power Apps platform features an intuitive visual design and drag-and-drop functionality. Its user interface (UI) mimics applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint that many users are familiar with and comfortable using. The platform is extensible and can interact with data and create connectors and apply business logic to any app created.

Apps built using Power Apps provide advanced workflow capabilities to convert manual processes into automated processes. These apps can run seamlessly on iOS, Android and Windows devices, providing flexibility and responsive user experiences.

Developers can build model-driven apps from core business data and processes in the Dataverse. These apps model forms, views, process flows, business rules and other components. Power Apps automatically generates UIs for model-driven apps that are responsive across devices.

In addition to canvas apps and model-driven apps, Power Apps lets developers build micro apps known as cards. These apps have lightweight UI elements that can be replicated across multiple applications without any coding or IT expertise. Cards can surface business data through Power Platform connectors. They can also be customized using business logic.

Although Power Apps is designed to be friendly to non-technical users, professional developers can also use it to build and customize new apps. Developers or app creators can apply their programming skills to Power Apps to do the following:

AI Builder supports many model types for different business scenarios. For example, a user can refine a custom object detection model to detect products in images. Another user can use a prebuilt scanning model to automate reports and receipts, while a third user can use a business-tailored custom prediction model to design marketing campaigns using historical data.

Microsoft Dataverse is a low-code data platform that lets organizations create and run thousands of applications intelligently at scale. It can integrate data from multiple sources into a single source.

Dataverse stores its data in an automatic set of tables, but users can also create and populate custom tables specific to their organizations using Power Query. These tables are manageable and secure, provide easy access to Dynamics 365 data, use rich metadata and ensure data quality with advanced logic and validation.

Users can use Power Apps to connect their custom business apps to the data stored in Dataverse. They can also build apps by using Power Apps and Dataverse together directly without any integrations. The business logic and rules already defined in Dataverse tables are then applied to apps created in Power Apps to ensure data consistency.

At the conclusion of my last article I guided you to write three test cases that characterized the behavior of the calculator application under three different sets of input values: two positives, a positive and a negative, and two zero values. After writing these three tests, a discerning programmer would have noticed that two sections of code were common to and repeated in each of the three tests: the initial setup code and the concluding tear down code. No doubt an astute object-oriented programmer would wonder: Could I have written these code segments one time? Could they have been automatically invoked at the proper time for every test in the series? For those who are just reading along, here's one test case with the common code in bold face:

Granted this code is trivial, but in most production quality applications you will have many more steps to build, and to set the state for the complex memory structures you need to support the method under test; ditto for the code you need to clean up after a test run. Wouldn't it be useful to write the code once and have it automatically invoked?

For this purpose, the pbUnit TestCase ancestor provides two "life cycle" events: SetUp and TearDown. pbUnit invokes these events automatically before/after every test event call in a test case. You write code to build your memory structures in the SetUp event and write code to destroy them in the TearDown event. pbUnit hands each test event its own isolated and individual memory structure, so there is no chance of having a "dirty" test structure. Figures 1-4 show what the test case code will look like after refactoring the test.

After a while the number of TestCase objects in your collection will grow. You will find that you need to run several test cases as a sequence to cover a particular area of code. You might find yourself wishing that you could group multiple tests together and automatically run them as a sequence. pbUnit provides a way for you to group TestCases together using a TestSuite class. Internally, pbUnit gathers all tests into a virtual TestSuite and runs them from there, calling SetUp and TearDown from each test to guarantee isolation. You can formalize the TestSuite and use it to your advantage. To construct a TestSuite, inherit from the TestSuite class in the constructor event for each test you wish to invoke the Initialize method, passing the testcase class name as a string parameter. Save the test suite class, giving it a name that starts with the word "Suite" so you can recognize it in the GUI. For the sake of clarity, organization and ease of use, you might create a library just for your suites. To run the entire suite as a sequence, select the suite from your test list and run it (see Figures 5, 6 and 7).

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