Power Apps is a great Environment to develope mobile client apps for your business, especially sales and warehousing solutions. Currently i work intensively with the possibilities of Power Apps. Like all Low Code Environments it has some challenges, but with some tricks many interesting apps can be done.
A special challenge can be the connection from Power Apps to Business Central. To connect BC its needed to activate the default BC connection to the wanted BC environment and company. Thats quite an easy step. This provides some prepared BC tables like „Customer“ with given field list. You can then create an App with assistants like listing and editing customer data, nice thing, but there only the given fields. No change of the field list is possible or adding custom tables. Additionally there is no possibility to run procedures like when using web services.
So one can only work data based using given tables and fields. Very strict. For real business apps you need more.
So how to get a custom table connected, more fields, custom fields shown in the table’s field list? It was quite hard to get that done. There is not much documentary for that step. To get that done its needed to run the Dataverse setup in BC, then activate the virtual tables. Additional a custom APIpage targeting the custom table is needed with publishing the whole thing afterwards.
For a client i developed at first place a warehousing/production solution to check status and data of an assembly order by loading the data to the mobile app via barcode scanner and setting the order to closed after the assembly activities so that the sales clerk is informed and can create, print, send the shipment to the customer.
The mobile app details:
- Handle Assembly Orders from Business Central on your mobile
- Scan barcode from printed assembly order, load order data like status
- Set order to Closed after finishing assembly activities
- Send changes to BC
The BC Part:
- New fields Closed, Closed Date & Source No. on assembly order page in BC
- Changes from mobile app are shown in BC
Pictures:
About Business Central: Its an ERP system from Microsoft available onPrem and as Cloud solution. 30 days Test accounts are available.
Interested in Power Apps and Business Central? Contact via PM, Mail and contact form.
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#warehousing #clientapp #virtualtables #powerplatform #dataverse