Apps
Apps are the root component for your web page.
Last updated
Apps are the root component for your web page.
Last updated
Apps can contain one or more pages. The simplest app will contain a single page with some content. You can call any PowerShell cmdlet that is available on your machine to populate your app.
You can use the App page designer to create new pages for your application. After creating a new app, click the New Page button on the right hand side.
In the modal for the new page, ensure that you leave the Use Designer setting enabled.
Once created, you will be taken to the designer for the page.
The designer allows for dragging and resizing of components that have been added to the page. Click the Add Component button to add a new component. Once clicked, you will be prompted with a list of supported components that will work in forms.
Component properties can be set in the Component Properties section of the left-hand drawer. The input controls will change based on the component type. You will see the component update immediately after changing the property. PowerShell script is running on the server to update these components.
Event handlers provide a special code editor that will open in a bottom drawer. Click the edit button for the event handler to edit the script that will execute when the event takes place.
The event handler editor supports code completion and integrates with PSScriptAnalyzer to provide code analysis.
After changing the code, you can simply click away from the drawer. The code will be persisted.
While making changes in the designer, you will want to periodically save changes. This will persist the app page back to the server. Changes made before clicking save are only available within your browser.
The save button is located on the top toolbar and will reload the page after save.
The designer creates PowerShell scripts based on the components in the page. You can view the current code for the page by clicking the Code View button. A drawer will appear with the current source for the page.
Here's an example of script generated by the designer.
Editing the generated code is discouraged because it can cause issues with loading components into the designer. If you wish to edit the pages directly, you will want to remove the -Generated parameter in dashboards.ps1 to allow for access to the code-based apps.
If you would like more control over how app pages are created, you can script the pages yourself. This allows for greater flexibility but does not enable the ability to edit the page in the designer.
Here's an example of simple dashboard that displays some text.
The top-level cmdlet for dashboards is New-UDApp. You need to call it when returning an app. You can use it with or without pages.
The content of the app is a series of components to display on the page. It's a script block that will return all the components in the order they will be rendered on the page. You can use the Grid component to layout items and display things like text with typography.
You can customize the header of the app using several parameters.
To change the navigation layout, use the -Navigation and -NavigationLayout parameters.
Components are the individual widgets that you can place on you app. There are components for displaying data, taking user input, adding text and images and more. Components can be downloaded as PowerShell modules and added to your app.
Components are be caused using the standard verb-name syntax for any PowerShell cmdlet.
Learn more about components here.
You can specify multiple pages within an app. Each page defines a route. As for v3, all pages are dynamic. PowerShell will execute on each page load to render the new page. Since UD is a single page application, the web browser does not need to refresh the entire web page when navigating between the different app pages.
Learn more about Pages here.
Built-in variables can be found on the variables page.
You can also use the Debugging Tools with apps.
When building an app, you will likely run into issues with cmdlet calls or syntax. Apps will auto reload as you make changes to the app files. If an app fails to start, you can navigate to the admin page, click Apps and click the Info button next to your app.
The Log tab will show all the logging coming from the PowerShell execution from within in your app. This should allow you to easily see errors and warnings coming from your app.
You can use Write-Debug to add additional log messages to your app. To enable debug logging, you will have to set the $DebugPreference variable at the top of your app script.
You can customize the appmenu by using the -Menu parameter.
