This Blogpost is in reference to my session on the "Empower your Career Conference". Here, I will walk through my findings and share the basic knowledge about the Power Apps Portals. This is helpful for those folks who are trying to get started with the Power Apps Portals.
Overview
Let's look at the individual components that we will look at for this tutorial on Power Apps Portals.
1. External-Facing Websites
You can create custom websites for external users and the URL is accessible generally unless IP Address Restrictions are applied. This overcomes the limitation of assigning licenses to the external users.
2. CRUD operations on data in CDS
The Portal application can be connected directly to CDS entities. Entity Views and Forms can be accessed on the web pages to perform CRUD operations on the data and all changes are reflected back to the CDS.
3. Entity Permissions
While retrieving data from CDS, entity permissions can be applied to secure data and show relevant/ delegated information only. This supports granular level of read, write, append and delete access levels.
4. Anonymous Access
Anonymous access can be set up on the websites and users can see data without having to log in. This depends on the usage of application and the business requirements.
5. Reusable Web Templates
While building Portals, one can create templates so that they can be used across multiple pages. This way if there is a change, it needs to be modified at one place and same would be reflected throughout the application.
6. Extend the capability with HTML and Javascript
Portals supports a feature to add custom HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, etc. code to enhance the UI and provides flexibility to developers so that they can customize the application as required.
Note: To clear the cache, you can browse to URL: https://yourportal.powerappsportals.com/_services/about
Create a New Portal
To create a new portal, you can follow the below video:
Once the portal provisioning starts, it checks if the Portal solutions exists, if it does, the configuration is updated and if it does not exist, all the portal solutions are imported first and then the portal is provisioned.
Tip: If the portal is provisioned for the first time, it takes about 20-30 minutes to import all the solutions.
Demo #1: Change Footer
To update the footer, you need to update the "Web Template" in the Portal Management App, you can follow the below video to do that.
The footer code has been referred from here.
Demo #2: Get data from CDS
In this demo, we will look at configuring webpages to show data from CDS entities. Let's break this in few steps and complete all of those one by one.
Step 1: Create Web Pages on the Portal
To create web pages, you can open the Portal App in Edit Mode and follow the video below:
Step 2: Configure Entity Views/ Forms on the Portal Management App
To create reference to the CDS Entitiy's Views and Forms, you can follow the below video:
Step 3: Configure Web Pages to show data from CDS.
To create reference to the CDS Entitiy's Views and Forms, you can follow the below video:
Let's see the above created items in Action
Below video is a demo of how the above configuration works.
Step 4: Setup Entity Permissions
To setup entity permissions for showing records only to specific Security Roles, you can follow the below video:
Demo #3: Show/Hide Page based on Security Role
To Show/Hide the pages configuration based on Security Role, you need to create a Web Page Access Permissions. This is demoed in the below video:
Demo #4: Custom Javascript code
The Portal application can be configured with custom Javascript code. In this demo, we will see how we can hide a few checkboxes using custom code on Profile Page.
I hope this helped you in Getting started with Power Apps Portals. In case of any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach me out on twitter at @agarwal_ritika