YAML Generation in Power Apps
Published at Mar 2, 2025
Table of contents
What is YAML?
YAML (which stands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language) is a human-readable computer language that’s most commonly used for configuration files. You might have seen it if you’ve ever had to work on Azure DevOps pipelines for your Power Platform projects.
In the context of Power Apps, in basic terms, it’s tells a canvas app what properties a control has, and looks something like this:
It might look a bit daunting, but this is just a text control with a font colour, some Power Fx to figure out what to display, and the X and Y properties.
Why is this useful?
There are a few reasons why it’s useful to be able to view, copy and paste YAML code. One of the major reasons is that it gives us the ability to generate YAML code to paste directly into our apps. This means that, instead of copying and pasting controls and then manually changing things, we can set some criteria and then generate everything already changed. For example, we could automatically rename our controls instead of having to do it manually.
The app I’ve created will add the following screen to your clipboard, and all you have to do is paste it into your app. How cool is that? I’d love to see what you come up with, using the same concept.
Download
Just import this solution in https://make.powerapps.com