This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.
This article is brought to you by the Nonprofit Tech Acceleration (NTA) for Black and African American Communities Program Technical Team. For information on how to take advantage of the granted offerings or free technical consultation, please visit: Supporting Black Community Nonprofits | Microsoft Nonprofits.
Model-driven app design to focuses on adding components such as forms, views, and charts and dashboards to tables using an app designer tool. Additionally, relationships connect tables together in a way that permits navigation between them and ensures that data is not repeated unnecessarily.
Benefits of the model-driven approach
There are some notable advantages to this method of application development.
- Once the data model and relationships have been created, the build process is relatively rapid due to rich component-focused no-code designers.
- Apps have a similar user interface across various devices from desktop to mobile.
- The apps are accessible and responsive automatically.
- The user experience is consistent across all model-driven apps. Once a user is confident with one model-driven app, later apps are easier to adopt within an organization.
- Migrating apps between development, test, and production environments is relatively straightforward by using solutions.
Security
- The platform is reliable. It is the same as is used by Dynamics 365 apps, to cover complex business processes and govern millions of transactions in the biggest businesses in the world.
- Model-driven apps have tried and tested application lifecycle management options.
- Dataverse supports a strong and flexible data security model affecting the degree to which users can interact with table records and columns.
Extendibility
- Any Dataverse table component can be used and reused, such as contacts, accounts, or any custom tables created.
- Model-driven apps integrate with Office 365.
- Dataverse is extendable through use of Azure services, such as Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse.
Usability for all
- Model driven apps are accessible to users with disabilities including those that require screen readers.
- Offline capabilities are native to model-driven apps.
- Multilingual label support to ensure that your apps can be used worldwide.
Empowers citizen developers.
- Minimal user interface maintenance as much of the experience is delivered via configuration versus outright coding.
Minimum requirements for building a model-driven app
Model-driven apps can be complex. However, the minimum requirements for building them are relatively straightforward.
- A Microsoft Power Apps license.
- Capacity to create a Power Platform environment. This is a feature of the Power Apps and Dynamics 365 licenses held.
- A Power Platform environment.
- A Dataverse database within the environment. This is selected when you create an environment.
- Privileges for the maker to work as a system customizer or environment maker in the environment where the model-driven app is created.
- A table. (There are many standard tables, including account, which exist by default.)
- One table column. (Every table has at least one column, and many system columns.)
- One table view, to view records. (There are a number by default.)
- One table form, to enter data. (There will be one by default.)