Use the Plan designer (preview)
[This article is prerelease documentation and is subject to change.]
Learn how to use the Plan designer, a copilot-first development tool, to quickly create comprehensive business solutions. Describe your business problem in natural language and provide relevant images such as business process flows or screenshots of legacy apps. The Plan designer generates a complete Power Platform solution tailored to your needs, including Dataverse tables, canvas apps, model-driven apps, and suggested Power Automate flows. Follow the steps in this article to create a business solution and refine your requirements for precise and customized outputs.
Access the Plan designer from the Power Apps home page. It guides you through a multi-step process to generate user roles, user stories, data tables, and user experiences.
Important
- This is a preview feature.
- Preview features aren't meant for production use and might have restricted functionality. These features are subject to supplemental terms of use, and are available before an official release so that customers can get early access and provide feedback.
Prerequisite
On the Power Apps home page, turn on the Try the new Power Apps experience toggle. You should see the Create a solution for almost any business problem banner at the top.
Create a plan
To show you how the Plan designer works, let's use a sample scenario to build a solution for managing paid time off (PTO) requests for employees and managers.
Sign in to Power Apps.
In the textbox, type Employees need to log vacation days, and managers need to approve them. You can also provide more context like process diagrams, data models, or screenshots of legacy apps. When you're done, press Enter.
Copilot opens the Plan designer and begins creating a plan by identifying the user roles needed to address your business scenario based on your description.
Generate user roles and user stories
Copilot shows you the user roles and stories that it generated based on your description.
In this scenario, two roles were generated: employee and manager. Each role comes with its own descriptions and user stories. On the left side, the user roles and stories are presented in a bullet list, while a visual diagram is shown on the right side.
Review the user roles and stories. Then, choose one of the following options:
- Select Accept to generate a data model.
- Select Change to provide feedback for the generated user roles or stories. You can select a specific user role and enter your feedback.
If you need to make any changes, provide a brief description of what you want to modify. Here are examples of what you can ask Copilot to do:
- Add a user role for HR admin to monitor PTO across teams to manage payroll.
- Add a user story for employees to view PTO blackout dates.
- Remove the user story for managers for viewing vacation history of team members.
Review the changes and select Keep or Undo. When you're done, select Accept to move on to the next step and generate data tables.
Generate data tables
The proposed data tables are listed in the Data section of the plan. Select Show details to view the data in a diagram.
Show details opens the data workspace, where you can view the complete Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) containing all the generated tables. These Dataverse tables come with predefined columns and sample data. To see the specific details of a table, select View data.
Important
During preview, the data workspace experience is read-only. The following items are not supported:
- Editing tables or columns
- Editing relationships between tables
- Adding existing tables
Edit tables
To modify the proposed tables, navigate back to the Plan designer and select Change.
When you're ready to generate user experiences, select Save tables.
Generate user experiences
The Plan designer proposes a set of user experiences tailored to solve your business problem. In this scenario, a canvas app, a model-driven app, and two Power Automate flows are created. These user experiences are designed for specified user roles and with data tables generated from the previous steps.
To view details of the proposed user experiences, hover over the information icon. The pop-up info card displays the name, description, targeted user role, and the included data tables.
To make changes, select Change and follow the steps above. Or select Accept to create the assets.
Accept user experiences
Once you accept the proposed user experiences, they're created. To open a canvas app or model-driven app, select the plus icon (+). Opening precreated Power Automate flows isn't supported; it navigates to the Power Automate page within your solution.
The proposed apps open in a new tab, fully functioning with the added data tables.
For canvas apps, a preview of the app is displayed with a welcome screen and other screens connected to tables. When you open a model-driven app, it launches the modern app designer with the tables already added. Both canvas and model-driven apps can then be saved and published for use.
Save plan to a solution
When you save a plan, it is stored within a solution. This action also enables the Objects view in the Plan designer, allowing makers to seamlessly switch between their plan and the solution view without leaving the Plan designer. For more information about solutions, see Solution view.
To save your plan:
Select the Save icon on the upper right corner.
Enter the plan name.
Choose a publisher or select an existing solution that will contain the items generated from the plan.
Select Save.
Known limitations
The Objects view is currently in preview, and several functions that are native to the solution view don't work in the embedded Plan designer experience.
Navigation Issues:
- When using the Back button after creating a new canvas app, model-driven app, Page, component library, or connection role, users are taken to the All section of Objects instead of their last location.
- After saving and exiting from the row summary, users are redirected to the All section of Objects rather than their previous location.
- Editing a table and then using the Back button also redirects users to the All section of Objects instead of their last location.
- Creating a new table and using the Back button takes users to the All section of Objects rather than their last location.
- When creating a new column security profile in apps, saving, and then using the Back button, the Back button doesn't work and results in continuous loading.
- Navigating to Table > Forms/Views/Command and then using the Back button redirects users to the All section of Objects instead of their last location.
View and edit plans
When the Plan designer is turned on, you'll see the Plans menu in the left navigation pane. Use this menu to access your plans and make any necessary edits.
- Plans: Menu to access your plans.
- Your plans: View your plans.
- Edit: Edit the selected plan.
- Edit or Delete: Edit or delete the selected plan.
Known limitations
- Inline editing user roles and user stories: Direct inline editing of content isn't supported. All changes must be prompted in Copilot first to regenerate iterations.
- Edit tables in Data workspace: Editing Dataverse tables generated from the Plan designer isn't supported.
- Add existing tables in Data workspace: Adding existing tables in the data workspace within the Plan designer isn't currently supported.
- Supported user experiences: The Plan designer only generates canvas apps, model-driven apps, and suggested Power Automate flows.
- Generated Power Automate flows: Power Automate flows created in the Plan designer take you to the Power Automate page but aren't automatically generated.
- Solution/ ALM support: Data and artifacts are saved to a new solution with the same name as the plan. The publisher defaults to your preferred publisher. You can define the publisher using the save icon in the top right corner.