Animating PowerApps

PowerApps does give you a few handy pieces that you can start assembling to make the UI a bit more interesting.  While animated slide in/out trays and menus are not provided by default, you can create them from the tools provided at least in some form or fashion.  Some of this is actually fairly easy if you have the right components to start with.

It looks so easy!

Do keep in mind that as I have mentioned in other posts, you cannot catch the OnHover or OnFocus events specifically, so you might be restricted on certain aspects.

OnSelect is not OnFocus: Translucent Controls Use Case

This is again one of those minor annoyances of something that you'd assume will work this way that does not.  Clearly the PowerApps engine recognizes this event but doesn't really expose you to it in a way you might assume.

It is doing you a "favor" in creating a simple shortcut for when the control is "in focus" for the border thickness/color when a control is in focus, but you cannot catch and respond to an "OnFocus" event because it does not exist.  I hinted at this in an earlier post about Fixing Tab Order.

Therefore, while you can catch clicks into a control easily (e.g. OnSelect event) you cannot catch when the user uses the TAB key to arrive at a control.  In fact, you will also start punching yourself when you notice there also is no OnHover event to catch (although you can control border size/color similarly to above).

JSON operations in MS Flow (Power Automate)

Microsoft Flow (now renamed Power Automate probably because a bunch of other stuff in the world is named "Flow") has a lot of assumptions around JSON built into it.  The "Object" variable in Flow is actually only considered valid if it is valid JSON.  In truth, it should be referred to as a "JSON Object" for clarity.  To support this functionality it does some things behind the scenes that aren't expressly shown on-screen.

Ultimately, Flow automatically escapes out any String variable if you add it to a Flow Object variable.  So you don't have to do squat.  For the most part.  Read on.

NOTE: You might also find useful info within the following post as well: Stupid Power Automate Tricks

Using Microsoft Forms with Power Automate/Flow (and SharePoint, PowerApps, Excel and beyond)

Microsoft Forms is a dead-simple UI interface to allow end-users the ability to generate and distribute surveys to internal and even external users.  It isn't horribly complex and the number of things you can do is vastly dwarfed by the number of things you cannot.  However, it is good enough to get some basic Q&A from users w/o bringing a web developer into the equation.

However, what do you do w/ the survey data?  How do I save this data "somewhere else"?  What if I want to include some higher-level logic?

Once you start to understand the pieces of Microsoft's o365 offering you will start scratching your head about how it all connects together.  There are always questions of how/why you should do to integrate X with Y.  But in almost every single scenario, the answer is: do it in Power Automate (Flow).