28 articles about Studio, in reading order.
Parsware Platform
A dashboard in Parsware is a screen you draw. Counted tiles, charts, the table's own grid and its quick create form sit on one page, and the page goes into an app's navigation like any table.
Parsware Platform
Completion helps once you know roughly what to type. The eye button answers the question before that, what can this script call at all, with every function the script can use, its arguments and a line on what it does, in a list you can search. Here is where it is, what it lists, and the one-line version on a Studio binding that inserts what you pick.
Parsware Platform
Studio screens and reports are drawn on one canvas, the Graphic Designer. Here's where everything is: the toolbar, the tool rail, the layers and components on the left, the inspector on the right. Touring it, we fixed two small things in its right-click menu.
Parsware Platform
Pan with the wheel, zoom with Ctrl, and press Shift+1 to see the whole drawing or Shift+2 to fill the window with what you selected. Trying them, we found the zoom keys missing and added them.
Parsware Platform
A frame is a screen, a page or a box that holds other things. Start one at a phone's size, draw inside it, and turn it into a tablet: what's inside follows the rules you give it.
Parsware Platform
Drawing a shape, selecting one or several, and moving, resizing, turning, copying and stacking them. Trying each, we fixed three things: a new shape is now selected, the arrow keys move it, and a typed angle turns it in place.
Parsware Platform
Guides that line a shape up with its neighbours as you drag, and buttons that align, match and space several shapes at once. Trying them, we stopped the guides catching shapes that aren't on screen.
Parsware Platform
Keeping shapes together as a group, combining them into one shape, and using one shape to frame another. Trying each, we fixed three things: double-click now reaches a shape inside a group, and a combined shape stays in its frame with its rounded corners.
Parsware Platform
Placing text, giving one word its own weight and colour, fonts and sizes, and choosing whether the box fits the words or the words fit the box. Trying it, we fixed two things: you can now type as soon as you place a text, and styling after typing reaches the whole line.
Parsware Platform
Solid colours, design tokens that follow light and dark mode, linear and radial gradients, and icons from the platform's library. Trying them, we found every icon drawn as a solid blob on the canvas, and fixed it.
Parsware Platform
Rows and columns that arrange themselves: a frame that lines up what is in it with one gap and one padding, keeps it lined up as you add things, and lets one child take the spare room. Trying it, we fixed Ctrl+D, which used to drop the copy on top of the next item instead of into the row.
Parsware Platform
How a shape behaves when its frame changes size: pinned to an edge, stretched between two, kept in the middle, or scaled with the frame. Set once, it holds on the canvas and on every screen size the app runs on. Trying it, we found the ten choices were English in every language, and fixed that.
Parsware Platform
One colour, text style or shape style used everywhere and changed in one place, and design tokens that make it follow light and dark mode. Trying them, we fixed three things in the style dropdown: it ignored the keyboard, showed every token as the same blue, and squeezed its own banner.
Parsware Platform
Make a component from what you selected, place as many copies as you like, change the original and every copy follows, even in another app. Trying it, we fixed a component that left its words behind when you typed a new position, a menu that named the command differently from everywhere else, and text that started out in the wrong font.
Parsware Platform
A component that looks different when pointed at, or in a state your screen decides, and an interface each copy is given: properties it shows and events it raises. Drawn, not coded, and nothing runs when the pointer moves.
For Power Apps
Parsware for Power Apps is a managed Dataverse solution that adds two things to model-driven apps. Reports laid out to the pixel and bound to your tables, and screens you draw and place on a form. It runs entirely inside your tenant, and your data never leaves it.
For Power Apps
A model-driven form is a column of fields. Sometimes a record needs something else beside them, such as guidance, a checklist, or a panel with its own buttons. With Parsware you draw that part as a Studio screen and put it on the form, where it sits with the record's fields and moves between screens without the form reloading.
For Power Apps
Some values are easier to pick than to type. A drawn field is a Studio screen placed on one column of a model-driven form. It shows the column's value and writes it, and the form saves it like any other change. Here's a contact-channel field with three buttons in place of a text box.
For Power Apps
A drawn field can work with more than the column it sits on. Bind up to three more columns to the same Parsware Runtime component, and the screen reads them all and writes any of them by name. Here, choosing a contact channel also fills in the case's next step.
For Power Apps
A drawn screen can load real Dataverse rows when it opens, count them, chart them and list them. Here, a panel on the Case form shows how many cases there are at each priority and the five newest ones, read live as the signed-in user.
For Power Apps
A screen on a form doesn't have to fit everything in its section. It can open a card in a modal over the whole page, or slide one in from either side as a drawer, and close it again. Each card is drawn once, beside the screen, and opened by name.
For Power Apps
One line in a button's Pressed opens a different published design over the form, a report in Power Apps' own dialog or a Studio app in its side pane, with the record you're on passed along. Here is openDesign, and how it differs from navigate and showModal.
For Power Apps
Everything a drawn screen does is written in BS, in a code editor inside Parsware Studio. The editor knows your Dataverse environment, so it offers your tables, then their columns, as you type, and it underlines a mistake before you save. Here is how to use it.
For Power Apps
Power Apps replaces a broken code component with six words, "Error loading control", whatever went wrong. The Parsware Runtime control says what is wrong instead, in its own space on the form, and the form designer shows it before you save. Here is every message, and what to do about each one.
For Power Apps
Every Parsware report and screen is drawn in one designer, which runs as a page inside the Parsware Studio app. This is a tour of it, from the list you open a design from to the toolbar, the layers, the components, the canvas and the properties panel, and what changes between a report and a screen.
For Power Apps
A top bar, a menu or a footer that appears on every screen should be drawn once. In the Parsware designer that is a component, a main drawing with copies placed on each screen, and changing the main one changes every copy. Here is how components work in a Power Apps design, using the Starter app that ships with the samples.
For Power Apps
A Parsware report can be written in Persian or Arabic. Type the words and each text box turns right to left on its own; lay the page out from the right, and the preview prints it the way a Persian or Arabic reader expects. Here is a report turned into Persian in a few minutes, and what follows the reader's language on a screen.
For Power Apps
A canvas app and a Parsware Studio screen are both screens you design yourself, and both can sit on a model-driven form. They behave very differently once they're there. Here is what each one is good at, and how to choose.
