Introduction
Many organizations rely on custom, line-of-business web apps to manage day-to-day operations, and those apps often need direct access to the structured data and business logic already stored in Dataverse. Building that data access by hand means writing authentication code, Web API calls, and error handling for every table and operation—work that pulls developers away from the user experience.
Power Apps code apps reduce that overhead by providing built-in Dataverse connectivity, so you focus on your application logic instead of rebuilding data access for each app.
Scenario: Equipment requests at Contoso
Contoso runs an internal equipment-request system built on a custom Dataverse solution. Four tables anchor the system: employee, device, request, and allowance. When an employee needs a replacement laptop or monitor, they submit a request through a code app. A code app is a custom web app built with React and TypeScript that runs on the Power Platform managed platform.
Before the request goes through, the app calls a Dataverse custom API that checks whether the employee's current allowance covers the device they're requesting. Because the same app moves from a development environment to test and then to production, its configuration needs to adapt at each stage without any changes to the underlying code.
What you explore in this module
Using this equipment-request scenario as a thread, you explore how to connect a code app to Dataverse tables so the app can read and write records directly. You also explore how to call Dataverse actions and functions, like the eligibility-check custom API, from your app code. You also explore how to use environment variables, so the same code app picks up the right configuration values in Dev, Test, and Production.
By the end of this module, you can connect a code app to Dataverse data and perform Dataverse operations from app code. You can also configure environment-aware settings that support moving an app across environments.