What’s new in Power Apps: July 2024 Feature Update

The ability to have Copilot explain a formula was released in English earlier this year, and thousands of people are using this capability every month to understand Power Fx formulas that have been written inside of Power Apps. Explaining a formula can be helpful when someone else wrote a formula and you’re trying to understand it, when learning Power Fx, or validating Power Fx that has been generated for you by Copilot. We are happy to announce that we have expanded the language support to 19 additional languages:
Chinese (simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish

The language preference is based on the primary language browser setting, so set the browser language accordingly to test this new functionality.

More makers now have access to the ability to generate Power Fx from natural language using Copilot. Any new app that is created will allow makers to use the comment (// or /*) syntax to input a text description of what they want the formula to do, pause and wait a few seconds or push enter to have copilot begin generating a formula.  If a formula can be generated on the prompt provided, it is shown and the user can accept or reject the suggestion or can rewrite the prompt to have the copilot try again.

To turn on this capability for existing apps, go to Canvas Studio settings > Updates > Preview > and turn the toggle to On for “Copilot comment-generated formulas”

The API playground is a preauthenticated software testing tool that helps makers quickly and conveniently interact with the Microsoft Dataverse Web API. This web application allows developers to test and experiment with different API endpoints without the need for extensive setup or authentication processes. It also conveniently presents certain available actions and links to documentation for faster learning. Use this tool to explore what’s possible in the RESTful API, test user-defined workflows, and more.

Key features
• Securely pre-authenticated: All API interactions occur within a secure and controlled platform environment, leveraging existing platform security features to ensure only authorized users can make API calls. No more third parties to rely on or worry about.
• Convenient web interface: Quickly interact with the Dataverse Web API without the need for extensive setup like software downloads or non-Microsoft account setup. You can access the tool from the Dataverse accelerator, a Microsoft app available in all new Dataverse environments and can be installed in any environment.
• Educational & user friendly: Presents the various actions and capabilities available in the Dataverse Web API, making it easy to quickly learn what’s possible and how to implement it. Implemented with adherence to Microsoft Coherence best practices + latest Fluent 2 alignment with first party maker portal standards.

While you edit or play your app in Studio, a continuous analysis of app elements and their interactions is happening in the background. This lets Studio determine the types of all the variables and collections in your app, maintain a real time dependency graph of relationships between different expressions, and keep track of what columns your app uses from every data source. For example, this allows us to know that if you change an expression Set(x, 5) to Set(x, {Lorem: “Ipsum”}) that the type of x is now a record instead of a number, and any references in your app to x + 1 will therefore be marked as erroneous.

We’re thrilled to announce that the New Analysis Engine is now generally available (GA)! This major milestone is all thanks to the feedback from our early adopters and app makers during the experimental and preview stages.

We are excited to announce that calling SQL Server stored procedures in Power Fx is now generally available in all regions. You do not need to call a Power Automate Flow to use a stored procedure making development of Power Apps for SQL easier for authors and faster overall performance for both authors and end users. The ability to call stored procedures for the SQL connector directly is an extension to the existing tabular model and gives users access to tables, views, and stored procedures. This feature extends our ongoing support of SQL Server as a primary development target for Power Apps.

We’re thrilled to announce that Microsoft Power Pages now support file uploads up to 10GB! But that’s not all—your end users will also enjoy an enhanced experience with these new capabilities.

Now you can upload files of sizes up to 10GB for form attachments with Azure Blob Storage integration. No more small file attachment size limits! Plus, you can also enjoy the improved file upload experience with features like file size and upload progress, delete and download files, and error messages. And if you need more customization, you can use our web API to access and manage your attachments stored in Azure.