Low-Code and No-Code Development Platforms
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Thirteen parts planned, built, packaged and installed the Career Development Plan app. This last part walks through the finished app as an employee and as a manager, then gives you a checklist for running it for real, what it doesn't do, and every guide the series produced.
Part 12 produced the release files. This part installs the two managed ones the way a buyer would: in a new environment, on a new SharePoint site, with nothing carried over from where the app was built. Then a manager and an employee use it.
Environment variables keep a solution's settings apart from what uses them: which SharePoint site and lists an app reads, for example. When a solution's variables arrive without a value, the import asks you for them, so the same solution can point at a different site in every environment. This guide fills them in during the import, and in a settings file for the CLI.
An instant cloud flow runs when someone starts it. You don't need the designer for that: the flow's details page has a Run button that asks for the flow's inputs and starts it. This guide runs a setup flow that arrived in a managed solution, and checks the result.
Importing is how a solution gets into an environment: you upload the zip, Power Apps shows what's in it, asks for anything it needs from this environment, and installs it. This guide imports a managed solution in Power Apps, then does the same with the Power Platform CLI.
Everything you create or import in Power Apps lands in the environment shown in the header. Before you import a solution, build an app or add a table, check that it's the right one, and switch if it isn't. It takes two clicks.
A trial environment is a free, separate Power Platform environment with its own Dataverse database, for 30 days. It's the cheapest way to test installing a solution somewhere other than where you built it. This guide creates one in the Power Platform admin center, limited to one security group.
A Power Apps trial gives your account, for 30 days, what a Power Apps per user plan includes, and Microsoft requires it before you can create a trial environment, even if you're an admin. This guide starts the trial from the page Microsoft links to, and shows what changed afterwards and what didn't.
The app and its setup flow both work. This part turns them into four files anyone can install: both solutions, checked, at version 1.0.0.0, as managed and unmanaged zips, and without this tenant's SharePoint site and lists inside them.
Exporting turns a solution into a zip file that another environment can import: managed to install it, unmanaged to keep developing it. This guide exports the same solution both ways, with the same version number, and then does it with the Power Platform CLI.
