Monday, January 31, 2022

ALM Accelerator for Power Platform - Pros & Cons

 Microsoft released another innovate tool to Manage Power Platform (Canvas & Model driven) Applications using Application Life cycle Management(ALM)

Ste by step guide : https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-the-alm-accelerator-for-power-platform/ 

My first Impression with ALM

ALM Accelerator is tightly coupled with Azure DevOps & git, but there no link between recent relese features like CO- Authoring features, So by end citizen developers should maintain 2 git repos for store same solution.

Setup & maintenance complexity is same like earlier version. this tool is good fit for small originations not for Enterprises.


Co-Authoring in Power Apps - Limitations

Microsoft released many new features in Power Platform in 2021, there are 2 main features are very useful for developers. 

Co-Authoring as an experimental feature to Power Apps.

Co-Authoring as an experimental feature to Co-Authoring in Microsoft Teams

Co-Authoring in teams lets you edit a document while another person is editing the same document.

With Power apps it is just the same. You can edit one app with multiple people at the same time.

Be aware though that enabling Co-authoring is more than just enabling a feature. When multiple people edit the same app, it is very important that you use the same standards and that you are aware of which parts each person is working on. like Standard development / release Life-cycle using Version controls (Gits or Devops)

Saving your work on a regular basis, and collecting other people’s changes regularly might be a good idea.

Based on documentation, I tested in both Azure DevOps & git repos. found few bugs in additions limitations. 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/git-version-control.

Steps Followed:

  1. Created Github Repository
  2. Generated a personal access token for my ID in github
  3. Created a canvas app and connected it to Github repository
  4. Provided github repo and canvas app access to another user
  5. User needs to generate a personal access token for himself
  6. Edit the app and other user must provide his github credentials

Now both users can edit and work on the app simultaneously

Known limitations

  1. This feature isn't compatible with code components. Don't use this feature with apps that make of use of code components.
  2. This feature doesn't work with public Git repository. Use a private repo instead.
  3. This feature doesn't work with on-premises Git repositories. The Git repo must be hosted on the web and accessible with username and personal access token.
  4. Edits to the same property on the same control aren't merged. The last edit made will win.
Additional findings :

Co-authoring feature is not working for Dataverse & SQl  tables, but SharePoint works fine without any issue.