Next in my blog series on Power Pages is a walkthrough of another specific feature which I found very interesting when reviewing the product.
The overall power of Power Pages is in the ease of building a data-centric website and this couldn't be more visible than with the addition of Editable Grids.
The main advantage this brings to users is the ability to edit data in a more intuitive way, whilst also creating a better user experience.
To begin, let's head over to Power Pages site, https://make.powerpages.microsoft.com/ and select the site we wanted to add our editable grids too.
Once in the editor, we can can select the "List" option from the component viewer, bearing in mind it best to add a section first in which we will house the editable grid.
Once we have selected the page and added the List component, a small wizard takes us through configuring the exact grid we will display and make editable. Basic configuration options here are the table the list will come from, the view to be displayed and a name of the view to be displayed
There are some additional settings related to the actual data stored within our grid, such as turning on/off the ability to create, view, edit and delete records.
As we enable each one of these options, the UI will ask us which form we want to display for the creation, view, editing of a record. These forms are all driven from the customisations area of the table, so any chances you make there, will be reflected on your site.
Lastly to ensure our grids loads and display within our page interface, we can configure the number of records per page. From testing this, more than 50 on a page lead to slow page performance.
If we need to make changes, we can easily double in the grid and gain access to the settings, where in the below example I am adding additional views to appear in a view selector on my page.
With most types of data access and manipulations on Portals, we can control the permissions available to the data. This is particularly important as we are providing a way for potentially external users to update information in our dataverse database.
Once we are happy with the chosen list, have added any additional settings and configured the correct permissions, we are ready to publish to our site and test.
Hope you all enjoyed this post on the Power Pages. The addition of Editable Grids is a major feature improvement of data capture capabilities in Portals. I will continue this series with some additional content related explicitly to Power Pages. Take Care, and Speak Soon!