Power Apps – Portals (Part 3)

Overview

Welcome back to our Power Apps series!!! This is the last blog of this series. If you haven’t visited our previous blogs, then please go through them.

1. Power Apps → Canvas Apps
2. Power Apps → Model-Driven Apps

Portals are a new feature to Power Apps dealing with the incredible functionality of sharing the app to the users outside the tenant. Power Apps Portals can build low-code apps and responsive websites, allowing external users to access the app.

The Portals are created based on the Environment, i.e., SharePoint administrators need to create an environment, and in that Portals are created. The Environment is a storage space where organizations’ data, flows, and apps are stored and managed. By default, every tenant has one environment created, accessed by all users in the tenant. Only one portal of each type can be created in an Environment. In this blog, we will give a clear idea of Portals and how one can make it.

Portals

Let’s create a Portal in which a user can log-in using his/her LinkedIn account. But before proceeding, an environment creation is required for creating Portal

Note: SharePoint developers can also create a Portal in the current environment you have logged in if no other portal of the same type exists.

Create an Environment

• Log in to Admin Center of PowerApps using the URL https://admin.powerapps.com.
• Under Environments, create a new environment by clicking “+New environment” and adding the required details.
  
• Once the environment is created, it will ask for creating a database.
  
• After creating the database, switch to a new environment.

Create Portals

• Navigate to the Power Apps platform using URL https://make.powerapps.com.
• Click on “Apps” on the left navigation menu.
  
• Select Portal under the “+ New app” option.
• Enter the Portal details and click on Create.
  
• While the app is provisioning, notifications will pop up on the right side.
• After the app is provisioned, it will appear under the Apps section.
• Edit the app as per your requirement.

Opening the Portal in Edit mode has the provision to change the default pages as per the requirement. This blog is not covering the ways you can edit the Portal.

• Clicking the Portal name will open the Portal. Below image is an example of the Portal.
  
• The interesting part of Portals is that we can allow the external users to access the app and even view or add the data to Common Data Service. CDS explained, in short, is the storage space for Power Apps.
• Here the blog will proceed on how the users can log in to Portals using their LinkedIn account.

Power Apps external Authenticate with LinkedIn

The first step is to create the Apps inside LinkedIn, which will enable a button allowing the user to sign in using a LinkedIn account into Portals.

• Navigate to http://developers.linkedin.com.
• Click on the “Create App” button and insert the App details.
  
• Make sure the “Sign In with LinkedIn” option is checked.
  
• Click on Create App, and the app will be created.
• Click on the Auth tab and change the OAuth 2.0 settings.
  
• Add the Redirect URL under OAuth 2.0 settings.
• The URL of the Portals app was created and appended /sign-in-LinkedIn after it.
• Click on Update.

Now the next step is to connect this app to Power Apps Portal. SharePoint developers can follow the below steps to connect it.

• Navigate to the Portal App created in the Power Apps platform.
• Click on the Settings option available on selecting the app.
  
• Navigate to Site Settings.
  

The page will open the Active Site Settings. We are required to configure the LinkedIn settings by editing its Consumer Key and Consumer Secret.

• Add the Value field of the ConsumerKey to the value of Client ID of the app created in LinkedIn.
  
  
• Similarly, add the Value field in ConsumerSecret to the value of the Client Secret field of the app created in LinkedIn.
• This will add the LinkedIn button to the Sign-In page of the Portal. The Sign-In page will open by clicking the “Sign in” option available in Portal’s header.
  
• Clicking on the LinkedIn button will allow you to login with a LinkedIn account, and the profile will be displayed.

Conclusion

Through this blog, one gets an idea about creating a Power Apps Portal and provides it to an external user to play with their portal. One can also give access to their apps through this Portal. If there is a requirement to allow data access to any user in an appropriate form, SharePoint developer can achieve it through our Power Apps blog series.

Here’s the Link to all the Post in this series:
Power Apps – Canvas Apps (Part 1)
Power Apps – Model Driven Apps (Part 2)