A Complete Guide for Migration to Power Platform: Best Practices

This is the 5th part of the migration series, Kindly read the previous post before proceeding further, Best Practices are the important aspect of the conversion life cycle. When you do an activity repeatedly it becomes a practice. If that practice brings success to the project then it is called Best Practice. So, it is mandatory to follow the below steps as they will fit into any conversion projects. There might be some repetitive points as we discussed the best practices when the related subject came, please skim through those points.

• Static URLs and Static values should be captured in variables and placed on the power automate workflow. So, whenever the workflow is moved to another environment or another site we can easily change the references to the deployed environment. For a standalone canvas app, development should be carried out in “Solutions” as it supports Environment variables.

• Screen size should be determined in the initial stage of development as in a later stage if you adjust the width of the screen form will get collapsed. Normal screen height can be set to a maximum of 2160 px if the form requires more than that, directly try out the scrollable screen as it offers much flexibility by providing the scroll bar if the form height increases.

• Controls should be properly named as they might be used in multiple places based on the functionality, ie., txtFirstName.Text is better than DatacardValue32.Text and it makes the function more readable and maintainable.

• Naming conventions for variables should be followed for better readability and the type of the variable can be identified by referring to their names. In case, if any new developer takes ownership of the application it will not end up confusing.

• ResetForm() should be mandatorily used on “FormLoad” to eliminate the cache issues and if any variable has been used it should be cleared as well. Otherwise, the app will seamlessly haunt you with cache issues.

• All kinds of threshold issues should be kept in mind while development, starting from nested if conditions, lookup threshold, item threshold, etc.

• Error handling should be done wherever necessary in PowerApps and Power Automate.

• Form size and type should be determined based on the existing application or number of controls.

• Use global positioning and global size for controls by configuring a single canvas control with the dimensions X, Y, Font size, height, width, etc. Use the same in all the other controls as GlobalControl.X, GlobalLabel.Size. Collection or Variable can also be used hold the global properties. This helps in maintaining the form design while the form grows longer.

• Placing galleries inside form control will have some limitations in rule executions and nested galleries. Galleries placed independent of any form control works out great.

• While using multiple forms in the design use “Patch” to update the form values like Form1.Updates, Form 2.Updates, etc.
• Reference Links: Microsoft Guide lines, Power Apps Limitations, Power Automate Limitations, Known Issues

Please leave your valuable comments and suggestions, Happy Building 🙂