Building a #PowerApps app for #MSProject data Part 5 #SharePoint #PowerPlatform #PowerAutomate #LessModeMorePower #NoCode #CDS #Office365 #PowerBI

This is the final post on this mini series for building an app around the Microsoft Project data saved to SharePoint sites in Office 365. In part 4 we looked at building / extending the simple Model-driven Power App that was started in part 1, if you missed part 4 it can be found here: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2020/05/09/building-a-powerapps-app-for-msproject-data-part-4-sharepoint-powerplatform-powerautomate-lessmodemorepower-nocode-cds-office365/

In part 5 we will wrap up this mini series with reporting. This will just cover the intro to building out your report using the data from the CDS entities we have built to support this app to get you started. This will be a Power BI report, launch the Power BI Desktop app and click Get Data > more then Power Platform > Common Data Service:

Then click Connect, it will then ask you for the server URL, enter the URL and click OK:

The correct URL can be found in a few places but if you are not sure – here is a guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/common-data-service/data-platform-powerbi-connector#finding-your-common-data-service-environment-url. Enter the credentials if prompted. In the Navigator window, expand entities then select the entities that you created for your app. In my example I’ve selected the following + the System Users entity:

Click Transform to load the datasets in the Power Query editor:

Update the data as needed. Here as a minimum I renamed the queries, removed columns I don’t need then renamed the columns. Once completed click Close & Apply. Now in Power BI, click the Model icon from the left nav and create the relationships between your datasets – here are mine:

Now you’re ready to build your reports, click the Report icon on the left nav and design the reports needed based on your requirements. I created two calculated columns in the Projects table to show the Project Start and Project End dates from the related tasks using a DAX calculation :

My example report pack for my Microsoft Project tasks looks like this:

Projects:

Project Gantt – your Project Center:

Task Details:

Project Risks:

It’s very easy to report across multiple Microsoft Project plans now that we have got the tasks from the sync’d SharePoint task list sites into the Common Data Service (CDS) as well as reporting on our extended data we’ve created in the example model-driven app.

That concludes this mini series of building a Power App containing Microsoft Project / SharePoint Task list data, as you have seen, it is very simple to build this app with no code required! I will post a summary later containing all of the links for the 5 posts created for a quick reference.

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