What is the best strategy for building a control panel for properties?

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Posted on by Future_Vision

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I started down the path of building a control panel for all of the properties in my app. Here is a rough of it.

While I think this is useful to some degree it is tedious having to set up all of the properties with the values found here. I know. I could set it up on a single control and then copy and paste but I still need to do a bunch of renaming etc... What would be great is to be able to add controls that have 'placeholders' for these values. That way I can simply open this screen(or flyout panel) and make tweaks to the app as needed. Is there a strategy for doing thing?

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StalinPonnusamy Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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My 2 cents. This feature may be in the future but from my experience creating a responsive screen itself took a long time to build it. And later we decided not worth doing those since we know what kind of device employee are using.

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RandyHayes 76,299 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@Future_Vision

Yes, you could do this with a component. Make your component generic. Use data tables for all of the sections or for all of the value. Utilize galleries in the component to display information. Have an output property on your component that has a record or table of all of the properties. Your app then would reference the output property to get its property value.

The struggle is usually with altering all of the controls in the app to reference the properties from the component. But, a trick is that you can set up a page with one of each control type that you will use. Change the properties on all the controls to reflect to the component. Then, when you want to insert a new control (a label for example) instead you would need to go to that screen and copy the control and then paste it into your usage screen. A bit of a pain, but easier than altering all the properties.

Extra $0.02 ... now you have $0.04 😃

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Future_Vision 634 on at

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@RandyHayes
That is sort of what I do now. I create a dropdown, for example, and set all of the properties up on that one component referencing that screen I posted. Then just copy and paste the component and make any appropriate name and property changes.

I was looking at maybe building a template that changes the default settings of the controls similar to what is explained here (at a very high level) and here at a more detailed level.

Or maybe going this route although this seems more app editing oriented?
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/source-code-files-for-canvas-apps/

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Future_Vision 634 on at

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@RandyHayes
Still thinking this through but this could be an option. Thoughts?

Update the default values in the Themes.json file like I did here for the button. I probably need to do a little thinking around the naming convention but this works for now.

Then I build an component called 'sample_1' or 'sampletest' or 'sampleSample' or anything other than 'sample' to prevent naming collisions because I'm going to want to rename my instance 'sample' in this case.

Then in my component I have an output property of BTNColor. in my example below I used a text input but it could be any control capable of passing a color value

Just need to think through how to set up the 'panels' for each control in the component.
Is it a single table with options for each type of property? At least for those controls that are not direct text input?

AND figure out the best way to save those settings since it all goes away if I close/refresh the app.
I'm guessing this has to be saved to its own database. Maybe even include a unique identifier for the app so this the same datasource can be used for other app settings? Not really sure how to structure this yet. I'd gladly welcome some input.

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