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() 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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
NOTE: 2025 John here popping in to say none of my opinions have changed.
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.
NOTE: It is now June of 2025. You know what's still working w/o modification? Everything I wrote below. You're welcome.
