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.

Starting Your App: Splash Screen vs. OnStart

Microsoft revamped how they handle the OnStart event for PowerApps last year (2022) and they made some additional tweaks this spring.  This has led some people to messing around w/ an array of methods using OnStart and StartScreen and just causing themselves no end of headaches.  Ultimately, there is one way you should start your application, and that is with a Splash Screen that does all of this in one place.

Writing Collections from PowerApps to SharePoint using JSON & Power Automate

I had done this quickly back in October when I first tried out the ParseJSON() function in PowerApps, but hadn't gotten around to documenting it up.  Then when I went checking to see what everyone else had written up I saw that Shane has done a video on this.  Oddly enough, we both approached this nearly identically.

However, I'm dropping this here for posterity and because I always like to read my own typing vs. listening to anybody else's voice.  ;)

If you have solved grabbing lots of records from "somewhere" (i.e. SharePoint) and returning it to your PowerApp as a bundle of JSON using Power Automate, the reverse is now what you need to solve for.  Fortunately, writing out a lot of updates is similarly easy, but also similarly obtuse per guessing exactly how to get it done.  Here's the Q&D on how to make it happen.