Monday, June 5, 2017

Prototype and fail early with cloud-based development

In these days of rapid and incremental software product releases, where development companies add features for our benefit but often before thoroughly testing them, it's crucial that we all approach projects in a prototyping mindset and find the bugs early rather than assuming that all released features are going to work as we progress through an application.

It used to be that when you bought a license to, for example, Microsoft SQL Server, you were confident that any problems you encountered were likely due to your own code.

These days, it's difficult to know whether a bug is due to something you're doing wrong or whether it's a "known issue" to the software manufacturer due to releasing functionality too quickly.

My latest example of this relates to Microsoft PowerApps. I created and finalized several screens and moved on to the last part of the project and that was to simply list records from a Common Data Service (CDS) entity that relate to a record selected on a previous screen. This is fully supported and Microsoft provides examples on how to do this.

Then I ran into this "known issue": "For some connectors, the connection to the data source is lost if you modify the Items property."

In my case, I selected the connection to the CDS entity for a data table and went to apply a filter and the data source disappeared. I thought that I was doing something wrong so I re-read the documentation on using filters and the best I could tell I was using the functionality the way it was designed.

Then I searched online some more and eventually ran into the issue.

I'll likely find a work-around to this bug, probably by storing the related data onto the main CDS entity itself.  But this is another reminder to myself, and hopefully to you as well, to approach application development with cloud-based platforms in a way where you prototype as much of the functionality first before spending a lot of time polishing various forms/screens so that you can switch gears on your design when you run into an issue like the one I described.

1 comment:

  1. As a work-around to the PowerApps bug where a Common Data Service data set gets removed when you try to apply a filter for a data table, I decided to move the project to Azure SQL as the data store. Before I moved the data to SQL, though, I followed my own advice and created a simple PowerApps mock-up to be sure that filtering works before I built out the database and imported the CDS data. Unlike with CDS data sources, filtering SQL-based data in a data table is working fine.

    ReplyDelete