Measuring Latency in Complex PowerApps

By Steve Endow

I have created a PowerApp that has several dependencies, and I am concerned about latency, and how that will affect the delay that a user experiences when they use the PowerApp.

In order to understand the latency, I have designed my PowerApp-based solution to measure and display elapsed times for key operations that are performed when a user clicks a button.

Here's a video demonstrating the design and the underlying code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rNDZWQpWF0

When I say "Complex" PowerApp, I am referring to an application or solution that has multiple dependencies or performs complex operations that may result in a noticeable delay for the user.

I created my first PowerApp! It's a Conference Badge Scanner!

By Steve Endow

I love attending conferences.  They are a rare opportunity to meet the faces behind the emails and voices and spend time with friends that you only get to see once or twice a year.

At the GPUG Summit 2018 conference in Phoenix last month, I had a great time, but there was one thing that I noticed was really frustrating me.

After a session, attendees would have questions or need assistance with a Dynamics GP issue, and I would promise to email them some information.  Sometimes I would hand them one of my business cards, sometimes they would hand me theirs.  If we had a pen handy, one of us would scribble something on the card to remind us what we talked about and prompt a follow up email.

Unfortunately, I have plenty of evidence that this process just doesn't work well.  Everyone is running around to different sessions at the conference, there are tons of distractions, we run out of business cards, the cards get stuffed into a backpack, and by the time we get home from the conference, exhausted, the last thing we want to do is sift through a pile of business cards with cryptic notes on them and try to remember what we were supposed to do, who we were supposed to contact, and which conversation went with which business card.

At the Summit conference, there were a lot of sessions on PowerApps and Flow, so I started thinking...

And I tweeted:

I had never used PowerApps and had never created a PowerApp before, so I didn't know if this was possible, and if it was possible, how difficult it would be.

Turns out, it is definitely possible.  And although it was a little more challenging than I thought, now that I've done it, relative to other things I've done, it's not that difficult.  And considering what the app can do, it's amazing how easy it is to build.

And here it is--my very own PowerApps Conference Badge Scanner!

So what do we have here?

In the upper left is the live view of the cell phone camera. When the app is open on my phone, I can take a photo of a conference attendee's badge.

In the upper right is a photo of the badge.  Because conference badges can have lots of other noisy text besides the attendee name, I found that it is best if I take a photo of just the text that I want scanned.