Power CAT Tools - Code Review Tool

In the last post, we introduced Power CAT Tools and how they benefit professionals and organizations working on the Power Platform. As mentioned in the last post, there are several tools included in the Power CAT Toolkit:

• Code Review
  • Automated code review with comprehensive guidance
• DocuPilot
  • Automatically generates documentation from your solutions using generative AI
• Risk Assessment
  • Comprehensive risk profiles and mitigation strategies based on predefined customizable baseline risk ratings
• Plugin Monitor
  • Analyzes plugin executions for troubleshooting, debugging, and performance evaluation of both pro-code and low-code plugins
• API Playground
  • Provides similar functionality to Postman or Insomnia, allows users to test various HTTP methods against the Dynamics Web API

In this post, we will dig into the Code Review Tool.

Open the environment in which you have installed Power CAT Tools and navigate to the Power CAT Tools model-driven app. Select the Code Review Tool.

The landing page of the Code Review Tool should be shown. From this page, we can view a listing of any reviews that have already been created. To create a new review, click the blue "+ New Review" button.

A dialog appears that allows us to enter a Review Name, Description of the Review, and to select an existing solution in the environment or upload a solution file for evaluating.

The review will process and generate results. The Code Review Tool evaluates Copilot Agents, Canvas Apps, Custom Pages, and Power Automate flows and provides guidance for how to improve each.

Once the results are generated, each component evaluated is assigned a score - this score makes up the percentage of tests that "Passed". The tests are checking components in your solution against best practices and guidance.

If we click the blue "Review" link for the component it will open the Review and allow us to see Low, Medium, and High severity items based on guidance.

We can select the "Details" link of an item to view guidance and affected components in our code.

Guidance for the test is shown.

Lets say that I wanted to export the results of this review to a PDF. We have the ability to send the results right to the logged in user's inbox. Simply click the PDF button in the top right of the screen.

At the time of writing, the PDF generated includes a simple screenshot of the Review screen. I suspect as this tool matures, more details will be included in the resulting PDF file.

In summary - the Power CAT Review Tool is pretty slick! You can see how checking your components against published guidance is beneficial when implementing Power Platform solutions.