Introduction

The Microsoft Power Platform offers a variety of possibilities to "lend a hand" and to develop adaptations in Dynamics 365 or your own Power Apps. Without structure, this procedure can quickly become confusing for developers and IT departments. There are a variety of tools that can support the developer in his efforts but no central place where everything comes together.

apptech Power CID Portal is a web portal developed by applied technologies that supports users of the Microsoft Power Platform in creating, testing and deploying self-developed or customised apps and components from Dataverse (formerly "Common Data Service") environment (formerly "Instances") to Dataverse environment within a Microsoft 365 tenant and to follow this process. Power CID follows Microsoft's Power Platform Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

Functionality

The Microsoft Power Platform is a low-code platform from Microsoft, which combines various services in the area of business applications, such as Power Apps (user interfaces for interacting with data sources) and Power Automate (process and task automation). Microsoft Dataverse is a central component of data storage. In order to be able to transport adjustments within these services, for example applications developed using Power Apps, from the respective development to the integration, test and production environment, these must be exported manually as ZIP archives by default and then imported into the target environment. To do this, the user must switch between the environments manually. This procedure can be seen as above-average time-consuming and error-prone, especially for inexperienced users. In addition, there is no overview of the adjustments made (so-called patches and upgrades) and therefore no possibility to restore older versions afterwards. Various rights are required for import and export within the Microsoft Power Platform environment, which are more extensive than would be necessary for regular use. This can be considered a security risk.

The independent web application apptech Power CID Portal is intended to eliminate these vulnerabilities and offers both the possibility to create adjustments in Microsoft Dataverse and to transfer them to other environments more easily than in the standard procedure described above. Manual handling of ZIP archives is no longer necessary. The web application also offers a clear and central depiction for tracking changes to the managed applications. It is also possible to download old versions of managed applications.

Technical Implementation

The application uses the Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL) in connection with the Microsoft identity platform. This enables a login in the apptech Power CID Portal with company accounts of any Microsoft tenant. For authorized access to the Power Platform environments of a tenant, the respective administrator must initially add and authorize an application user when setting up a tenant within the web application. This process is executed independently by the apptech Power CID Portal in the user context of the administrator to ensure the best possible user experience. The interaction between the apptech Power CID Portal and the interfaces of the Microsoft Power Platform or the Microsoft Dataverse takes place via HTTP REST requests.

The web application itself consists of a server-side and a client-side part. The Angular front-end framework based on the TypeScript programming language is used in the client. On the server side, the ASP.NET Framework is used to provide a REST API based on the Open Data Protocol (OData). The UI component framework DevExtreme is also used to design the user interface (buttons, tables, etc.).