Low-Code and No-Code Development Platforms
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A named formula gives a name to a formula so you can use the name anywhere in your canvas app. It replaces the old habit of setting global variables in App.OnStart. The value is always up to date, nothing can overwrite it by accident, and Power Apps only works it out when something needs it.
Power Apps Studio has a setting called Enable App.OnStart property, with a warning that OnStart "can cause delays when loading an app". It's tempting to switch it off to keep an app fast. This guide tested what the switch actually changes, and the result is a little surprising: in Studio, an OnStart formula still ran with the switch off.
Modern controls follow your app's theme on their own. Containers and classic controls don't: their colors and fonts stay whatever you set. The fix is to point those properties at the theme itself with App.Theme, so a header bar or a title label changes along with everything else when you switch themes.
A modern theme sets the colors and font of every modern control in a canvas app at once. Pick a theme, and buttons, avatars and anything else that follows the theme change together. Here's where the themes are, what happens when you pick one, and how to answer the question Studio asks about classic controls.
Modern controls are the newer set of Power Apps controls, built on Microsoft's Fluent 2 design system. They look current, work better with screen readers and keyboards, and all take their colors from one theme. In some apps they're switched off, and the Insert pane only offers the older, classic controls. Here's how to turn them on.
The app gets its home in this part: a Power Apps solution that holds the canvas app and three environment variables, which tell the app where its SharePoint data is. By the end, the app is created, connected to both lists and to Microsoft 365 user profiles, and ready for its first screen.
Where you create a canvas app matters. Create it from inside a solution and it belongs to that solution from the start: it can use the solution's environment variables, and it moves with the solution to other environments. This guide does exactly that, and takes a first look around Power Apps Studio.
A canvas app that reads a SharePoint list normally has the site's address and the list built into it. Move the app to another organization and it still points at the old site. Environment variables fix that: the app asks the variables where its data is, and each environment gives them its own values.
A solution is the box you build a Power Apps app in, so that the app and everything it needs can move to another environment together. Every solution belongs to a publisher, and the publisher's prefix ends up in the name of everything you create. Ten minutes spent on both now saves renaming later, which often isn't possible.
Every screen of the Career Development Plan app reads from or writes to two SharePoint lists. This part builds them, and the site they live on, column by column and setting by setting, exactly as the app will expect them.
