Losing a Co-Worker

Several years ago I had a very enthusiastic person join our organization.  He clearly had incredible intelligence, drive, and an almost manic need to learn/apply technology.  The more I was willing to share, the more he would consume my time.  While this can always be a problem when done to excess, he also was very aware and very thankful of me allowing him to consume my time/knowledge when I had availability.

He passed away just over a year ago in his 30's.  Cancer.  Brutal, sudden, and without notice.  I only became aware of it because I had emailed and texted him a few times over several months and finally his mother answered a text and informed me.

EJ posted a comment here on my blog two years ago. I had this comment in my moderation folder for years and finally just let it through.  It of course has his personal email and such (which is why I didn't share it originally), but something about that message sitting in my inbox for all these years kept nagging at me and I finally published it.

Concurrent Power Automate Queries: Optimizing for slow data sources

For large datasets and sometimes querying APIs or Power Automate queries to retrieve information concurrently, it is helpful to use the Concurrent() function to retrieve multiple items at the same time.  However, Concurrent() cannot exist within a ForAll() and when processing groups of items it may be required to chunk them up to avoid overloading a datasource (can you really query 1000 rows simultaneously from Excel or your APIs without breaking something?)  

This post walks through how to process chunks of data simultaneously while also giving a nod to the limitations of certain back-office platforms.

In my own scenario, this process is querying either an API (if it is working) or an Excel export from the same ERP.  As we have ~45,000 records in one of those Excel files and roughly ~200,000 in another, these queries can take up to 30 seconds to retrieve a value from one of those files per user.  So splitting up these tasks to take place concurrently is essential.

Detecting End-User Changes to Fields Before Saving/Abandoning Changes

There are of course many ways to approach how to detect if somebody changed a value in a field and set a flag to know if something needs to be "saved".  However, it can get complex if you are doing this for many MANY fields or also for a gallery of items where changes could be made to many of them at once.

This is an example of several ways to approach the problem so you can have some standardized code to make updates back to your datasource much easier and more efficient (and not throw errors).

SharePoint List Event Handler: The second-best reason you should use Power Automate

The regular reader might imagine I hate Power Automate w/ a fury of a thousand suns.  You would be wrong.  I hate Dataverse to that degree.  However, Power Automate has actual value.  It is just terrible at delivering it unless you are very careful.

Regardless, the second most value you can get out of Power Automate (here's the first) is to use it as a lightweight event handler for SharePoint.  In fact, it is very good at this and works very reliably.  If you have a list where you want to have "something" happen when a specific value changes to "something else", then this will walk you through it

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.