Probably translated too literally from the Dutch saying “Verandering van spijs doet eten” and a better translation would be “Change is good, variety is the spice of life”.
But, as you all know, my background is Food and I always try to create a link between Food and software.
This time it is about changing a canvas app into a model-driven app.
Why?
Why not!
Well, think Eric Burke made a very clear example.
Far way too many buttons in the app, requests for new features, so even more buttons and a lot of issues on responsiveness and offline capabilities.
And it would take too much time to correct it, building a new app, as a model-driven app, was faster and had a lot of needs out-of-the-box available.
Look and feel
Customers are always saying that they don’t want their users to know that they work in an app that is related or connected to Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM, they even want to have their own branding in an app.
So, the app should have same look and feel as Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE apps, same UI for mobile and desktop, and as the two new Microsoft apps, Microsoft Warehouse Management mobile app & Dynamics 365 Inventory On-Hand Mobile app.
This was one of the reasons to choose for a model-driven app.
Simplify the User eXperience
Less buttons, only show users information they need to see, hide the noise they don’t need to see, are the related phrases on this part.
I can’t see it in an other way.
Out-of-the-box capabilities
What I say now may be outdated or trigger a reaction because it wouldn’t be right, but sometimes you have to do it consciously.
A model-driven app comes with nice and needed out-of-the-box features, which I didn’t see in a canvas app or are not that easy to implement.
Some are:
- Responsive by design on all mobile devices
- Offline-first capabilities are standard
- Scanning of all barcodes and QR-codes
- Supports all Dataverse out-of-the-box capabilities
Customisations
Well, what to say on this. Every customer seems to be unique and can’t work with standard offered software…
That is why software companies make money on customisations.
On the model-driven app it is possible to create customisations, do customer branding and extend the app in a faster way then a canvas app…
Food for discussion!
Other Stuff
A model-driven app…
- Is ideal for complex business logic
- Has Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
- Has a Business Process Flow
- Is an end-to-end solution
The story ends
Creating Power Apps for the business world is certainly not always easy, it starts with a good conversation about the users, what they want to do with the app, how are they going to use it, on which devices and many more questions to cover before you start to put down a design.
And if it has an integration with an ERP system, it is also important to look at the team, create a Fusion team and make sure the pro-devs and citizin devs talk to each other instead of simply knocking their code, which later does not connect.