Formatting HTML for PDF Documents Generated in Power Automate

Microsoft has a pre-release out which adds the PDF Print function in PowerApps to allow you to print containers.  It is handy in certain scenarios, but I believe in most situations where you need to generate documents for official policies and procedures, it is worthwhile to print/retain the source documents used to create them using any function that translates what you see into what somebody else sees.

Therefore, I believe in most situations where we are creating documents alongside official processes (HR, Legal, etc.), creating and storing the original HTML is essential instead of relying on a tool we have zero control over to serve as our record of what was created.

So this covers the older method of generating PDF documents from HTML using Power Automate.

What does one of my own apps look like?

This is more of an sharing of "what goes on under the hood" kind of a configuration of what most of my applications look like by default.  

This is by no means the ONLY WAY to do applications, it is just a jumpstart for anyone who is just really getting into how to deploy applications in 2024/2025 and avoid most of Microsoft's dropped balls and extra licensing costs.

2027 me is going to laugh so hard at this.  Assuming some recently elected moron doesn't blow the world up before then.

Distinct() on multiple columns

Distinct() is a handy function for finding unique values within a Collection.  However, it can only do this on a single column.  That limits the value unless you start to get creative on your lists.

Combining multiple columns into a single string that you can later Split() (if needed) can allow you to do a multi-column Distinct fairly easily and use the results readily as well.

Pull Comments From SharePoint List Items Into a Field

This is a blatant copy from Ellis's excellent post here.  He really did a great job of laying this out and documenting a Power Automate flow in a way that can be readily copied/applied.  The only issue being that the new Power Automate experience of course doesn't quite treat JSON blobs the same and you need to do a minor adjustment.

However, it is worth understanding how to get some of the additional details out of a SharePoint list (like Version History) and to include it in a way that can be exported/archived as items age out of a process.  

Searchable, Sortable, Filterable Items property for Datatables and Galleries

People don't generally ask me this question, but I do wind up rolling my eyes a bit when I see how others have solved for the problem of having a multi-item control (Data Table, Gallery, etc.) and they want to include the ability to search, filter, and sort within it.  

This isn't so much a problem that others won't figure out on their own, just that I think it isn't obvious how to do it in a reasonably consistent manner that you can use almost everywhere.  So I've included a walkthrough below to make it easier to get started.

Write files to SharePoint via Power Automate (Attachments and Document Libraries)

Others have written this up, and I smoothed out the errors I was hitting through Matthew's blog post here.  However, I wanted to draft up a slightly different take just to clarify some gotchas as well as solidify the use-case.

This approach fits w/ a series of other posts I've done on:

• allowing users to interact w/ SharePoint data they don't have rights to
• reading JSON data into Collections using Power Automate
• writing JSON data from Collections using Power Automate

And even with:

• starting your app w/ a splash screen vs. OnStart

All of these build into an ecosystem of very supportable and deployable applications that create a minimum of fuss while also being highly adaptable and portable across scenarios.

App Migration - Automated response to share requests for redirected URLs

If anyone has had their IT team decide to start putting the CoE Tookit in place and start dumping your applications into quarantine, then you might benefit from few patterns/tools for migrating applications in a more friendly manner.

When this started in our organization, one of the first things I did was to figure out the best way to communicate with thousands of users on how to point at a new URL.  At least, until "somebody" bothers to follow the process on how to migrate applications across environments and retain the URL.

NOTE: This pattern also works if you just want to move to a new app and deprecate your old one for any reason at all.

Using the Form Control Creatively: More flexible UI pattern

The first application I wrote for PowerApps utilized the Forms control.  It was...OK.  However, I kept bumping up against it limiting my ability to control the UI in ways that I really found problematic.

The pre-built handling for issues w/ Submissions are nice, but the main reason I was using PowerApps was to have a more flexible user experience.  Since that time I only rarely used Forms except when absolutely required.  

Until now.

Stupid Power Automate Tricks

As I have posted before, Power Automate is just terrible.  This is another of those situations where Microsoft had something "on the shelf" and just threw a new wrapper on it and called it done.  The language used is annoying and derived from Azure Logic Apps, the functionality is inconsistent in how it treats certain kinds of complex objects/arrays (I mean, it is consistent in that it is consistently terrible).  and the overall experience for version control is lacking (there is none).

However, here are a few tricks I keep coming back to time and again that I've pulled from other people's blogs but then time and again forget how to do just because I hate this platform so very much.

The "Best" datasource for PowerApps

I give lots of credit for the folks doing Power Platform videos on YouTube.  I too sometimes grab them as a reference.  However, Shane Young did a video a few days back that was just terrible.  My comment in response to him was a little snarky (which he left up and responded to), but then I went into detail of why his delivery on this was wrong.  That comment was deleted (not by me).

So here is my own version of his terrible take on: the best datasource for PowerApps.

To just jump to the answer, it is SharePoint.

I'm sorry.