Data sources and connectors

1. Data sources and connectors

Your app has a screen, a button, and a label. But every app you'll actually ship needs data: the records people look at, filter, and edit. This video covers where that data can come from, and how we'll load it in this course.

2. The words everyone mixes up

Before we touch anything, let's untangle four words people mix up. A connector is the bridge between Power Apps and a service like SharePoint or Excel. A connection is your specific sign-in over that bridge. A data source is the actual table the app points at, like a single SharePoint list. And an environment is the wider space your app and its data sit in. We'll meet each properly through the chapter.

3. Standard versus premium

Power Apps ships with hundreds of connectors split into two tiers. Standard connectors come with most Microsoft 365 plans and cover SharePoint, Excel, OneDrive, Outlook, and Teams. Premium connectors need an add-on license and cover things like SQL Server, Salesforce, and Dataverse. Everything in this course uses Standard connectors, so you don't need an extra license to follow along.

4. A tasks list for Lumen Coffee

The data for this chapter comes from Lumen Coffee's marketing team, a tasks list with five columns: Title, Status, Priority, AssignedTo, and DueDate. It's the same shape you'd see in any team tracker at work, in a SharePoint list, a spreadsheet, or a Dataverse table. That's what we'll bind to a gallery, filter, and search across the rest of the chapter.

5. Connectors and collections

So how does data get into an app? At work you would typically use a connector: click Add data, pick SharePoint or Excel or SQL, sign in, and the table shows up in the Data panel. That path needs a licensed connection and a tenant somebody has already set up. In this course we'll take a different route: the app builds its own table when it starts. It needs nothing but Power Apps itself, and every formula you write against it is the one you'd write against a connected list.

6. Building a collection with ClearCollect

The function that builds it is ClearCollect. You give it a name for the table, then the records to put in it. Each record sits inside curly braces, written as column name, colon, value, with commas between them. Clear-Collect does what its two halves say: it clears whatever was there, then collects the new rows, so running it twice gives you three rows, not six. From here on, Tasks behaves like any other table.

7. App.OnStart runs it once

Where does that formula go? On the App object's OnStart property. Select App at the very top of the Tree view, then open the property dropdown to the left of the formula bar and choose OnStart. Anything there runs once, when the app launches. One catch: editing OnStart doesn't run it; Studio only fires it on a real app start. So after typing the formula, open the App object's three-dot menu and choose Run OnStart to load the data straight away.

8. Gallery: how Power Apps shows lists

The control that displays a list of records is called a gallery. Point its Items property at a table, your Tasks collection, and Power Apps shows every row. We'll go deep on galleries in the next video; for now, just know they're how your data becomes visible.

9. What you'll build

In the exercises you'll create a blank app, put a ClearCollect on its OnStart to load Lumen's tasks, run it, check the rows landed in the Collections view, and then drop a gallery onto the screen bound to that collection.

10. Let's practice!

Time to get Lumen's tasks into Power Apps.

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