OMFG HOW I HATE FLOW / POWER AUTOMATE!!!!!!

I am angry.

Very angry.

I hate everyone involved in the creation of this tool.  Even if you are trying to make it better.

I just want you all to get space herpes.

Today's rant is brought to you by an entire team of people who suck at their jobs.  Or...perhaps some people who are being told to not make things easier for people working with SharePoint data and to focus on making it super-easy to use the CDS/Dataflex/Dataverse/whatever data store...

NOTE:  If you're visiting this in 2025, then know that you need to switch between the Classic and New viewer for an array of tasks.  So before you completely abandon this thing, just know that some stuff should still be done in the old view, while some stuff should be done in the new "experience".  YOU CANNOT ONLY USE ONE OF THESE SO BE PREPARED TO SWAP BETWEEN THEM WHEN (NOT IF) THINGS DON'T WORK AS PLANNED.

Dynamic Icons

This is pretty simple and is mainly just a place to dump this code for others to use.  If you're wanting to programmatically change icons on your page and populate/change them based upon inputs from "somewhere else", then you'll need a collection of icons that you can perform a LookUp() against.

For example, say you want a generic toolbar to use in all of your apps and to control that based upon some settings you might import from Excel or retrieve from SharePoint.  This would allow you to have a Collection of Icons displayed that would be populated with only what you need.

 

How to create sliding trays

I wrote a broader discussion on Animating PowerApps previously.  That article was a fairly broad discussion per animating in general.

This article is covering a start->finish design on setting up a sliding tray allowing users to show/hide application controls at run-time.

You cannot pass web parameters into a PowerApp on a Teams Channel tab

The title says it all. Well, except that it also doesn't work for any other website or HTTP(S) destination either.  In my opinion, it essentially cripples the argument for embedding forms into Teams for the majority of the use-cases.

NOTE: As of August 5th, 2020, I've included a segment on Dataflex here which might lead toward WHY this is the case and WHY they may never fix this!

I've done a bunch of testing on this last week just to see if there was some magic formula that I'd missed.  And while there are of course some weird workarounds of sending the data to "something else" that then your app reads it out of when it starts, that's a horrible solution.  Particularly when Microsoft wants us all to now work all day inside of Teams.

You can, of course, hard-code a parameter when you add a link to a Website and it will work.  However, you can't change it at run-time.

NOTE: Dataflex data stores show us a path forward through this.  It seems like Microsoft is adjusting how we link items from within Teams and share them w/ PowerApps is changing.  I would HOPE that this is one problem that will be addressed, but perhaps not via passing data within the URL.

Importing Excel data into PowerApps

This post walks through the basics of importing data into your application from an Excel Table. 

There is a lot of data that we work with that changes very rarely.  We could always have our application do lookups from online lists, but sometimes it makes more sense to store that data locally within the application.  This allows apps to be usable offline (e.g. mobile phones) and can also make apps more responsive. 

Creating Collections Manually and Using Them

PowerApps mainly focuses on lookups and variables that are linked to data sources that reside elsewhere.  In fact, it is REALLY GOOD at this.  However, what isn't really clearly documented in a single location are the formatting requirements around manual population of the various data sources within PowerApps.

If you're just getting started with static data and are importing it from Excel then read my post on this first and then come back.

Accessing and using device location

PowerApps really works well for people wanting to streamline a series of tasks that touch an array of systems/endpoints.  One key area in which other solutions fail is when they include mobile devices.