Project EST – Part 02 – PowerApps

1 Comment on Project EST – Part 02 – PowerApps

To be honest, in the past I have always wondered who actually needs PowerApps. I, who usually uses SharePoint and Co more bad than right, have never found a purpose for me.

With my solution for Scheduled Tweets the time had finally come. As described in the last part, I now had a SharePoint list that could display all relevant information. But I still needed something to edit the list:

PowerApps

As I looked around in the SharePoint interface, the button for the PowerApps caught my eye. Now it was time to see what is possible with it.

by clicking on “Create an app” you start and first you get the possibility to assign a name…to finally find yourself in a new interface.

To my excitement a quite usable app comes to light. Through the presentation it is possible to get a good overview of the tweets and to edit them.

A few small adjustments on the surface of the app, so that I also liked the UI … and I thought I got it

Filter, Filter, Filter

But then I noticed that the app can become quite confusing. My SharePoint list has a field “Sent” which can be used to check if a tweet has already been sent. The status will be changed later automatically after sending.

Since the list always showed me all list elements, the app quickly became confusing. So I needed a filter that was able to show me either the sent or the unsent tweets.

So it was time (in consideration of my lack of knowledge) to try something out and google or bing it 🙂

Im Standard hat die App einen Sortieren Button…also habe ich mir mal dessen Funktion näher angeschaut:

when you click the button you initiate an “UpdateContext“:

UpdateContext({SortDescending1:!SortDescending1})

the value of SortDescending is transformed into the opposite with every click. The following formula was stored in the list view of the app

SortByColumns(Filter(Tweets; StartsWith(Title; TextSearchBox1.Text)); "Title"; If(SortDescending1; Descending; Ascending))

via the “If” the sorting is reversed…so far so good

Toggle Sent-Filter

So I thought to myself, “I can do that, too.”

In order to visually see which list I’m currently looking at, I decided to use a toggle button… which was cleverly placed in the app and slightly modified in color.

the button now only needed the same logic as the sort button…I thought 🙂 in the settings of the button so the options adapted accordingly:

#OnCheck
UpdateContext({ToggleSent:true})
#OnUncheck
UpdateContext({ToggleSent:false})

I used True and false at this point, because my list value “Sent” is a Boolean value. Then I only adjusted the filter in the list pane:

SortByColumns(Filter(Tweets,Sent = ToggleSent, StartsWith(Title, TextSearchBox1.Text)), "Title", If(SortDescending1, Descending, Ascending))

and…it’s not working…

True and False or 1 and 0

As nice as my consideration with the filter was…somehow I always saw the same list. Some search in the Internet then brought me the solution:

I don’t like SharePoint

For whatever reason, the filtering cannot be done with true and false. It should probably work with “unequal” conditions … at the end I got it with 0 and 1:

#OnCheck
UpdateContext({ToggleSent:1})
#OnUncheck
UpdateContext({ToggleSent:0})

and it works with the list 🙂

conclusion

with little effort I now have an app that I can open on any PC, iPhone and anywhere else…great

jetzt musste also nur noch das “Senden” Thema geklärt werden….so now only the “sending” topic had to be figured out….

P.S. : PowerApps Pros will surely show me 200 ways how to do it easier, better and faster…well, what can I say … let me know 🙂

Dieser Post ist auch verfügbar auf: German

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1 Comment

  1. Eric Berg  - 18. September 2018 - 13:54
    /

    Thank you Thomas – who gave me the hint that I had a mistake in my code … changed it in the article so now you see right code

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