HTML Tables and Message Formatting

 I wrestled with what to label this one but decided to just keep it simple.  There isn't a great and straightforward way to create message templates within PowerApps currently and may find yourself struggling w/ HTML vs. Adaptive Cards depending upon the types of messages.  However, this at least will jumpstart your ability to create more standardized HTML Tables to include in your messages w/ minimal customization on your part.

Microsoft Dataflex/Dataverse/CDS - What is it and what does this mean?

NOTE: I updated this today (Aug 5th 2020) after meeting w/ some Microsoft representatives around what we currently know about Dataflex.

NOTE: As of August 12, 2020, it appears this will be renamed from "Dataflex".  Perhaps Microsoft staff used Bing to search for the term instead of Google and didn't realize that trademark was in use.

NOTE: As of November, 2020, they've re-rebranded the CDS to be Dataverse.

Microsoft announced yesterday (July 22, 2020) a new (old-ish) method for accessing/storing data for "Teams apps" which still brings some questions of what in the world a "Teams app" is and/or what is included in what license and what we essentially can do with it.

I don't have a lot of answers beyond what Microsoft has shared to date per Dataflex:

• it is included in base Teams licenses
• "Dataflex" is a subset of "Dataflex Pro"
• "Dataflex Pro" is a rebrand of the CDS ($$$)

And while I have been driving down a road toward divorcing PowerApps and Microsoft Forms from the ultimate data storage repositories and using semistructured data formats (i.e. JSON) for much of my recent recommendations, this seems to be an attempt to truly pin down some of the issues around deploying, supporting, and ultimately governing some aspects of the o365 landscape within Teams.

Low-code/no-code delivery model: NoSQL style JSON storage in SharePoint

I have a dream.

A dream where I can spin up a PowerApp (or Microsoft Form) in a few minutes, publish it out and the SharePoint list will magically be created.  A dream where others will then pick up the baton and perform the data optimizations and connectivity for an array of data sources while avoiding Microsoft CDS licensing requirements.  A dream where I can deploy applications in minutes and over the span of the next few hours, days, weeks, the rest of the work to fully build out the data architecture for the application can occur over a longer timeline w/o losing data or slowing down deployments.

I dream this dream almost every day.

NOTE: It is now June 2025 and any new visitors can read this knowing that I am a master at forecasting the future state and what Microsoft is planning.

Faux Drag and Drop using Hidden Sliders

One of the key features missing from a UI perspective from PowerApps currently is the ability to drag/drop items on the screen.  It definitely limits some of your options in building interfaces and controls that work in a way users might expect.

However, there are notes elsewhere on how to mimic this behavior in some limited fashion using sliders.  This walks you through a common use case of having a Gallery where you can move items into various stages similar to a Kanban board in a manner that will seem intuitive to users.

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.