Power Apps is a rapid, low-code development environment that app makers can use for building custom apps for business needs. It's a suite of app development services with a scalable data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) and an ability to interact with cloud and on-premises data sources. With Power Apps, app makers can create web and mobile applications that run on all devices.

Two types of applications that makers can build with Power Apps are:

Model-driven applications - Model-driven apps are connected to Microsoft Dataverse. Makers build model-driven apps by adding different components, such as forms, views, charts, and dashboards, to tables by using an app designer tool.
Canvas applications - Canvas apps are typically task-focused apps where makers can drag and drop different components and position them how they want to create a user interface.

Before you begin building your Power Apps solution, you'll want to map out what you need the app to do. First, what do you want to accomplish with the app? In other words, what are your business requirements or user needs? Second, since model-driven apps start with data, you'll need to develop a data model. Third, keeping your business requirements in mind, you'll add business logic to the design. Finally, you'll determine how you want to display the output.

Important factors to consider for app design:

Business Requirements
Data Model
Business Logic
Output

The Dataverse

The Dataverse is Microsoft's cloud-based data platform that serves as the foundation for storing and managing data across the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem. It's essentially a secure, scalable database service that enables organisations to store business data and build applications on top of it.

The Dataverse is a scalable data service and app platform where users can store and manage data from multiple sources. With Dataverse, users can integrate data in business applications by using a common data model to ensure ease and consistency for users. Dataverse is the common factor that allows the components of Microsoft Power Platform to work together. It's the foundation that helps users consolidate, display, and manipulate data.

Dataverse provides a standardised data model with built-in security, governance, and compliance features. It stores data in tables (similar to database tables) with rows and columns, but adds business logic, security rules, and relationships between different data entities.

The Dataverse, which until November 2020 was known as Common Data Service (CDS), is a data source that is available to the Power Platform and that allows you to store data in a structure that shares a lot of similarities to a database. The data is structured in tables (previously known as entities) that use columns (previously known as fields) to hold and structure the data very much like a database table that you expect to see in something as simple as a Microsoft Access database.

The Dataverse enables users to share data across several different applications within Microsoft 365, including Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Power BI and Power Pages. Unlike other data sources, to use the Dataverse, we do not need to provide specific connection information, as the underlying database is automatically connected to the environment where the app exists.

Model-driven apps

The primary goal of model-driven apps is to design a data model, which involves creating tables and columns, and adding forms, views, charts, dashboards, and relationships to ens

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Introduction To Power Apps