[MUSIC]
Erick Weitkamp: Hello, everyone. Today, I want to give you
a quick overview of a few features
that are included in the Power Apps 2020 release wave 1.
Key investment areas for this release are chart and dashboard
styling improvements to make your apps clear and cleaner, an
improved grid user experience with contextual search and filter
capabilities, and finally, a faster, more stable and easier data
source experience.
We've made a number of improvements to the Power Apps,
including save and save and close options during auto save.
And we've made a number of formatting, font, and development
improvements to the app designer to help give your applications
a clear and clean look. Let's see how this all works.
We'll start with a simple but popular update.
When you use model driven Power Apps, you will now see the save
and save and close option on the command bar when you're editing
a record.
Before this release, if the auto save option was turned on,
both of these save options were hidden.
The only visible save option was in the footer in the lower
right.
We've also made a number of improvements in the app designer to
give it a cleaner look.
For example, we've removed the blue lines on top, cleaned up the
headers and fonts, adjusted menus, and added labels to buttons.
We've also updated the dashboards display so that user
dashboards come first and the system dashboards are below.
We've improved the grid user experience with conditional search
that excludes data that's not selected in the view, a column
display that adjusts to show only those columns with data, and
intelligent filtering that aligns filters to the type of data
that's being displayed in the grid and column.
Let's see how this all works.
First, let's take a look at searching within context.
Here's a typical grid view.
In the search box that used to be labeled search for records is
now search this view to indicate that we're performing this
search in the context of this view.
So if I search my active contacts for Alex, I get back the Alex
Smith, who's in my active contacts view.
What I didn't see in my search was the Alex Wu in my inactive
contacts.
Filtering in columns used to have the same set of options for
each column regardless of the data type.
We now have context aware filtering so that your options change
depending on the data in that column.
For example, when we filter a text column, we get a list of
operators that relate to text.
So, I'll use does not contain data and I see all opportunities
where I don't have an account name or I can look for all
opportunities from an individual company by selecting equals.
And as soon as I put my cursor on the text box, I get a list of
all the data in this column that matches what I've entered.
When I shift to a date column, I get a different set of
filters, all based on dates.
So rather than having to give a date range, I can just select
this month.
This is especially useful in February when ending your date
range on the 28th misses everything due on the 29th but only
once every four years.
And when you're trying to sort by fiscal quarter, the default
is the present quarter, but you can adjust for any fiscal year
or quarter.
And finally, if you're filtering a column that is an option set
like priority with low, normal, and high as the only values, the
filter gives you check boxes for these values.
An improved data source experience and Common Data Service view
are now generally available.
This feature provides a number of useful enhancements for
accessing all data sources.
Your data sources are prominently displayed in a clear set of
menus and access to the Common Data Service is now more than 50%
faster and more stable.
The features and speed improvements make this way of connecting
to the Common Data Service preferable over the Dynamics 365
connector.
Let's see how this all works.
When you drop in a control that needs to work with data, we
automatically pop up this select data source dialog on the
right.
And you can immediately choose your common data source entity or
your connectors.
We'll select Accounts.
And you can also see the data sources on the left side bar.
This panel allows adding data sources to the app or creating new
connections without needing to insert a control.
It also provides an easy way to see the data source in your app
and perform actions like refresh or delete.
And you can choose to work with the views that have been
defined for your Common Data Service and then bind to one of
those, for example, active accounts.
A big benefit of working with Common Data Service views is that
the query for the view is run on the server not locally on your
device. This means you avoid delegation issues with the
core query.
In addition, you have flexibility to append other filter
conditions that are delegated.
For more advanced queries, just nest the filter function within
the other functions using the formula bar.
This data source view also unlocks other features.
For example, file and image are only available because of this
feature that allows us to talk directly to the Common Data
Service instead of through a connector.
As you've seen, the 2020 wave 1 Power Apps update provides you
with a number of improvements, including chart and dashboard
styling improvements that make your apps clear and cleaner,
an improved grid user experience with contextual search and filter
capabilities, and finally, a faster, more stable and easier data
source experience.
[MUSIC] For more information, use these specific links or go
to the release overview guide.