Experience in Power Apps Express Design

Express Design feature in PowerApps let you quickly build an app within a few clicks. Advantages here is you build an app by reading an image. Just like PDF scanner, read your image, identify what is what, and transform and build at the background effectively.  Easy, huh!

I was excited as well ðŸ˜Š Well, this post is my 10 minutes effort what I found. Initially I started with a complex image setting my high expectation to Power Apps family. I went ahead and prepare to build from image in Power Apps portal.





My first experimental UI was a pure .NET application having wonderful UI with more than 160 controls sitting on the same page. I took a screenshot of it and let Power Apps to play around it.

 


At the very begging Power Apps let me know this is too heavy. Recomended approch is to have within 30 controls in UI. I keep more than 30 and went ahead to see how it works.

This is standrad UI which initially ask whether you would like to create a Dataverse table now, or latter. I wish to check both, so initially select first and then camback and went without creating the table.



Finally, I found below the in my UI. I thought to have better template, better allignment, better UI thoughput. 


Now, I select a simplete UI, this is nothing but return recordset comming from SQL. I thought simple would be best fit for Express Design.


This time, I selected every field control and align the respective datatype. Make sure Power Apps understand what exactly I'm going to expect.


And then, once image convertted in UI, I found the following.




The questions came to my mind, about label or header design, how date filed able to hold data, and text control field unable to keep default data, how come an UI come with some more basic features.

Overall, even I look into the controls, and other way this app has been populated, looks like lots of best practise needs to be applued or implemented. This means lots of work.

In my opinion, it would be better to start from the scratch, rather than using this Express Design feature. I understand Micrsoft needs sometime to finetune this inm much better way and I look forward to see this again in near future.

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