Creating Custom Apps using App Designer in Dynamics 365
One of the exciting new features introduced as part of Dynamics 365 is the ability to create custom apps using App Designer. In today’s blog, we’ll show you exactly how to take advantage of this cool enhancement. With that in mind, here are step-by-step instructions for creating a custom app that we’ll call TestApp:
Go to Settings -> Application -> My Apps.
Click the + CREATE APP button in the upper-right corner, as shown below:
In the “App Designer” pop-up window, enter the details for your desired app. These include the app’s Name and Unique Name, which are both required, as well as Description, Icon, and App URL Suffix, which are all optional.
Once you’ve added the information in Step 3, click Next to reveal the “Components” window. As you can see in the screenshot below, for our TestApp, the App Designer has the following components:
ARTIFACTS
– Entities
– Dashboards
– Business Process Flows
ENTITY ASSETS
– Forms
– Views
– Charts
Next, you need to configure the “Site Map.” To do this, click on Site Map.
This will navigate you to the screen shown below, where you will be able to configure the Area, Group, and Subarea.
Click the Area button, and provide the details, as shown below. Do the same for the Group button and the Subarea button (also shown below).
In this example, we named our Area, “Demo,” and added two Subareas, “Accounts” and “Contacts.” TestApp now looks like this:
Next, for each entity, we add the Forms, Views, and Charts, as shown below:
Click Validate to check for dependencies. This button is displayed in the top-right corner of App Designer.
If there are any missing dependencies for these entities, they are shown with the orange-colored validation icon along with the total number of dependencies. In our example below, “Forms” has 18 dependencies in the “Account” entity and 15 dependencies in the “Contact” entity.
The specific dependencies are displayed in the window on the right side of the screen, as shown below. To fix the outstanding dependencies, simply click the Add Dependencies button. Then, click Save and Publish.
Navigate to TestApp as shown below.
And here it is, in all its newly-created glory!
We hope you found this helpful. For more information on creating custom apps, please check out our PO TV WEBCAST: The Beginner’s Guide to PowerApps. It’s chock-full of useful information. Happy CRM’ing!