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The article is a part of series of blog posts on Custom component framework topic. Please start from beginning to get the context.
For this article I will use Visual studio 2017 for development purpose. All the steps mentioned below will assume that you have Visual studio 2017 as your development environment. Also please note that of the current pre-release, you can set-up your development environment for machines on Windows 10
For this article
Machine OS: Windows 10
IDE: Visual studio 2017
Local directory for control development: c:\debajit\blog\powercontrols
Please follow the below steps:
Step 1: Install NPM
npm is the world’s largest software registry and open source developers use npm to share software. node.js come with npm. In order to install NPM, please follow the below procedure.
Navigate to site – https://nodejs.org/en/
Dowload the LTS one. You can even use the current version (12). Once you have downloaded, install it.
Step 2: Install Power Apps CLI (command line interface)
You can download the CLI from – http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/B/E/DBE69906-B4DA-471C-8960-092AB955C681/powerapps-cli-0.1.51.msi. This will download a MSI file. Once downloaded, install it.
Step 3: Set-up your Power Apps custom component project
The next step is to set-up the PCF project framework. In order to accomplish this, please flow the below steps.
1. Open Visual studio 2017 command prompt
2. Navigate to your local directory where you want to set-up your component project
3. To create a new component project, run the below command
pac pcf init --namespace <specify your namespace here> --name <put component name here> --template <component type>
Now that you have completed some critical steps, a explanation is the need of the hour.
“namespace” is the namespace that you want to provide for your controls. For example if you are an ISV and want to develop custom components, may be you want all your controls within a namespace that identifies your company. In my case I would use – “XrmforyouControls”.
“componentname” is the name of the control. Since I will be building a file input control here, I will use the component name as “FileControl”.
“template” – As of the current pre-release only two values are supported for this field and dataset
So my command line would be
pac pcf init --namespace XrmforyouControls --name FileControl --template field
As you can see, my project is created successfully.
4. The next step is to install project dependencies. Your component project would required lots of external files to build successfully. To install the dependencies, run the command “npm install”
It may take some time to install the dependencies. Your screen would resemble above while installing. Once installation is done, your project environment is ready and we will start building the control.
The first step as we discussed earlier in to build the manifest file which is explained in the next article.
You will also like the below posts
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- How to display a single delimited string as HTML table in Power Apps canvas apps.
- Substring in Power Apps canvas apps
- How to get last day of a month in Power Apps using EOMonth
- How to call a Power automate flows from Power Pages portal? Exploring the new integration of cloud flows with Power Pages.
Small update to the blog – we need to update the CLI to be the latest verion by running the command – pac install latest . As the current version throws up and error now.