Power Apps On Start: Goodbye Navigate, Hello App.StartScreen

#PowerApps

Power Apps gives us a property called the App On Start which allows us to put in formulas which will run when our apps are initially launched. There are several use cases which we might use the App On Start in Power Apps like caching data to use throughout our apps and a technique called deep linking which involves passing parameters into Power Apps with the Param() function and most commonly using the Navigate function to route to a particular screen depending on the parameter that is passed.

But there's a problem with the On Start in Power Apps and specifically with using the Navigate function in the On Start, it's imperative and it really can kill your performance. In this video, I outline a brand new property that Microsoft just released for Power Apps called the App Start Screen. This gives us a declarative way to programmatically tell Power Apps which screen we want to show at the start of our app.

I'm going to break down all of the details of this new property and what you need to do to start using it in your Power Apps.

LINKS

OTHER VIDEOS YOU MAY LIKE:

Table of Contents:

00:00 - Intro
00:41 - What's Changing?
01:25 - The Problem with App.OnStart
03:40 - What's Changing with OnStart Property?
04:22 - Find your Power Apps Editor Version
04:45 - Using the New Start Screen Property
08:55 - Configure OnStart Retired Feature

[cyberpau]

Wow this is awesome, April! Thank you so much for sharing this, and thanks as well for the special mention 😊 - John Paulo

[dhyrumc]

Great explanation and details on how to navigate all this! My co-worker and I were dealing with all of this just a couple days ago and this video just answered all the questions we were running into. Thanks!

[jimkurth]

Thanks for sharing this. This sounds like a great opportunity to check if the user is using their phone or a tablet/pc to go to a specific phone or tablet/pc layout. Responsive formatting is not always the best to use when setting up a portrait layout as opposed to a landscape layout.

[SaidElnaffar]

I learned other stuff along the way such as the Param function -- Mega thanks, April!

[reidugenia]

great video April! I played around with it today after seeing your video and I would say the function is a bit awkward to use. First it says that global variables are not allowed to be used, would have been great for dynamic screen selections. Second, it may confuse users as I experienced using global variables (declard in App.OnStart) in the onvisible property of the supposed landing screen seems to have not initialized yet! I was into thinking that everything on the app.onstart would be done first but it looks like loading the startscreen property runs them in parallel. So I think somewhere either it's a debug or needs some polishing.

[hayleeadamson]

April, you are the best! Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the rest of us!

[Nick-giyl]

This video saved my app. Thank you April

[dougydoe]

Thanks April for making this clearer. I do subscribe to the Blog so I saw this post and read it through. Very useful feature is sounds like so we'll try and make the adjustment.

[rituarora]

Thanks April Dunnam - for sharing this. Just on time.. as usual.

[razkenable]

Thank you for your informative videos, which are very beneficial. I have a question! How do you collect fields before navigating to the screen in Powerapps, when using SharePoint as a source?

[venkatasubbaraopolisettymv]

Thanks April! for sharing this new feature and took time to make this video.

[fadiahdab]

always amazing as usual, I was suffering from the slow performance i will try that new property
Thank you April

[clalapag]

This is so helpful. Going to implement and make changes to existing apps. You are awesome. Thanks April!

[starmole]

Yeah I feel like there's stuff in my start which is definitely best placed (as in, should run at the start of the App and then not again). Some stuff I definitely could see as declarative though. Very interested to see what these other features that are coming are...

[ashmon]

can we discuss why we are unable to reference collections or global variables from this Start Screen? it's not useful for role based navigation.

[mannymorales]

Thanks for sharing, April; very helpful information and a nice performance kick!

[marounsader]

hi april, how we will work with the branding you had a video on if onstart will be depreciated?

[varunattuluri]

I have a flow on on start of the application which will bring some parameters. Based on the parameters i need to navigate to the respective screen. How to achieve this. Please let me know if this is possible

[miprofetic]

Your video is very clear, but I have a huge favor to ask. How can I pass multiple parameters using IF. Seems like I can not use multiple parameters in StartScreen. Is it possible? If so, can you help me with the syntax? Greetings from Colombia.

[ashmon]

how can you apply this logic for role based logic in dataverse?