SharePoint Power Hour: PowerApps Tabbed Forms

hello everyone welcome I'm Laura Rogers and I have Joyal Jobson here on audio Hannah this is SharePoint power hour this is a live show we do Wednesdays at 11:00 we try to do it every Wednesday 11:00 it's been a holiday lately but we just we've been both of us have been working in SharePoint for like at least 10 years or so and we just use SharePoint power hour to just demo kind of something interesting maybe we figured out that week or something new that it's come out and we are not devs we're not programmers and so we cover topics that are not hardcore complicated technical or complicated programming just mostly out-of-the-box things that you can do in SharePoint without having programming skills power apps is kind of pushing that a little bit just in general just the way powerups is but as I'm teaching Power Hour I try to kind of cater it to you know explaining things as much as I can so today's topic and I have a blog post that I wrote that goes along with it that I put in the description here is going to be a way to do tabbed forms a tab form using power apps and I'm specifically I'm just going to do it in the SharePoint list form a customized SharePoint list form there are probably in powerups there are a lot of different ways to do just any any given thing you can think of so I the I when I wrote the blog post I wrote this is a way to do it so I'm sure there'll be comments with like 15 other different ways to do what I'm showing but this is just a way and I thought it was a pretty efficient way that I I've been working I've been immersed in a power apps project for the last few weeks and it's just something that I did in one of their forms so with no further ado I'll go ahead and show you I'll show you the form that I created from the blog post and I went ahead and I did put the blog post to it in in the chat there so I'll show you that form which I just literally wrote the low post this morning so it's right there still pulled up and um and then I'll start from scratch and then I'll just do that same form over again and show you how I did it step by step and this demo is gonna have a little more than the than just the what you know was it in the blog post because it's easier to just kind of throw in oh and you might want to do this and that and the blog post is just some pretty simple steps so stay tuned let's see what we do alright so let me go ahead and share my screen and okay there it is now here is just a simple little form thanks for creating the content type for the this demo Joelle I don't even know if you realize that you did but you created all the little PTO fields for me okay so this is again super simple just trying to convey the just the basic concepts here of what's in this form so I just use the PTO form because I thought I had you know good bit of fields and some different things we could categorized so um I'm just gonna fill it out real quick and I'll just put today in here this resolution is really big sorry about that and my font is apparently a weird size so then I've got you can see my different tabs I have have different so far when I'm out on PTO here's how you where you can contact me like an email like an emergency phone number or something like that so that's the idea between those different tabs and then I'm just using the out-of-the-box Save button that comes with the form so and I had a previous blog post where I explain the whole customizing the form thing and I also explained a few little caveats along the way so I'm not gonna go too much into the whole customizing the form concept and also this thing that I'm showing with the tabs doesn't have to be done in just a customized SharePoint list form it can be done in any power app but the method that I'm using specifically uses the cards so in SharePoint when you create put a form control on a power app just any power app one that you're customizing the form or one just that you start from scratch the form control whenever you pick fields to put in it columns it puts them on there as cards so I'm using the cards to show and hide the cards so this is really more specific to SharePoint data whether you start your power app from scratch or not so SharePoint data in a in a form control with cards alright so let's go and I'm gonna be a little brave and I'm gonna go just into the form settings on this PTO form this lovely that's weird the form settings didn't have huh maybe not I'll just create another one I'll just do oops not custom list PTO because I probably still have it in here as a template yep I'll just call it PTO - that was weird that it wouldn't let me get to the the form settings maybe we'll have time to troubleshoot that later it was pretty odd alright so I've got a list for PTO called a PTO - so let's go look at that and let's see this is just the out-of-the-box form test one I don't really have you know a bunch of required fields or anything like that but I went ahead and just created an item to show you that's what it looks like just out of the box and um I'm kind of gonna watch the slack Channel to see you know if you guys have any questions and things like that it's really good to see you all here looks like we have a couple of requests in there Joelle for people requesting to join too with that okay all right so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna customize the form for PTO and last time I talked about how you could create multiple screens in your power app and you can have a screen for editing the forearm a screen for displaying to form a screen for a new form and have all different screens but just like with InfoPath you know with InfoPath you had multiple views I got tired over the years of having to go edit like having copies of the view that were almost the same and having to go if I had to edit something go edit in all the different views so you could end up in that kind of conundrum with your multiple screens and power apps if you're just doing something very similar so usually try to keep it much more efficient and try to just use logic and show and hide things and stuff like that and just try to keep a little number of screens as possible and so the idea behind this the whole tab thing is that the first way that I would think of just if I was going to do tabs is that I would create like maybe three screens and put three different forms on them and you could click the tab and that would actually navigate you to another screen but the problem with that and the problem any problem with having three different forms like that is that when you're submitting to SharePoint you just want to be able to use the submit form function and it gets really complicated when you're trying to submit like three different forms if you have three different forms on different tabs so that you know you don't want it to be complicated I've seen other methods people have used where they've patched instead of doing the CIMMYT form but patching is a lot of work it's a lot of extra work to go like type all those field names and and do all that so this method I feel like is a pretty simple one so I'll go ahead and do a couple things to just I'll make this a little nicer looking change the colors and then the first thing that I'm going to do is just drag take I'm gonna select the whole I'm gonna select the whole form control so it's kind of tricky sometimes when you're trying to select the whole form because then you end up selecting a card so if you get stuck then you can just go over here on the left and select the form that way so now you can see the whole form control is selected and then I'm just gonna scroll it down so I'll have a spot to put some tabs like that up at the top and then I want my tabs to be I'm gonna start creating buttons and I want the tabs to be a different color I actually want the tabs to be the same color as the form and then I want the background to be a different color so that the tabs stand out so that you can tell that they're there so right now the background color of this form so I have the form selected when I go to look at the fill color it is nothing so it's pretty much clear form so what I can do is go ahead and fill that with something I'll just wow that's really ugly I'll do gray there's now the word still kind of show and stuff like that so now I've got gray and now I can make my tabs the same color too so then they stand out from this background yes you can revert to the default form after customization you should be able to go to form settings and do that but I'm not sure what I did to that other list that maybe you not be able to do that that's the thing I was talking about troubleshooting all right so another thing that I want to do is um I'll go ahead and start sticking I'm just gonna put one button on here so I'm just gonna start with one button because once I get my button just right and have all little settings and properties just right on it and I have it just like I want it to look then I can copy and paste it to make all the other forms you know what while I'm at it I'm just gonna make this whole thing bigger I'm just gonna go into my app settings and just change it to landscape just that we're not working on such a little small surface area alright see it's kind of kind of weird the way it does that it kind of just stretches everything out so let me just take a second to go arrange some things when it when it and when you change it to large it's just base like the font just gets gigantic so I'm gonna go over here and put some columns so then that'll kind of make it look a little bit more reasonable vertical three columns and get rid of like a couple of extraneous things that it's you know you'll have a lot of these systems the yields on here that you don't necessarily need so I just kind of uncheck those so now I've got three columns and another trick that I like to do is I like to go sometimes I'll just uncheck the snap two columns and then go to my card scale to zoom out a little bit this is the same and go to my cards and just you can like arrange them like that and like physically just put them all where you want them right so I could just snap to two columns but sometimes I like to have certain columns in certain places and certain like different widths and things like that and so not snapping two columns lets you have more freedom like that so that's the general idea there alright so now I had I had grabbed my form and dragged it down a little bit to leave a little space at the top just do that again cuz it undid what I had done when I changed that whole snap two columns thing okay and that text is gigantic I don't need it to be 36 let's do like um like to me alright and then um I'll just call this in general and this is again this is where I'm gonna do all these settings so that it I can just copy and paste it and you know create all the other ones so as I know I didn't do this in the blog post I didn't explain every single little property that I was putting in there but now since we have an hour I actually have time to go ahead and and show you what each of these things what they all are so when I click on this I'll go ahead and just I'm selecting my button this is all contextual and go to the Advanced tab and unselect this is going to set a variable so it's actually going to set a variable that I'm creating called forum tab and it's going to set it to just this value basics in quotes I'm not sure why it's got a little red underline let me just type it there whatever all right so it's gonna set a it's just basically when I do this set it's now the variable exists you don't have to go to a separate place or anything to create variables in here so now a set a variable and then for my disable border color I'm just going to go through these in the order that they are on the page now maybe I shouldn't go through on the order that they were they on the page I'll go through them in the order that makes logical sense because these properties all something are really important to understand about properties is that they can all reference each other so for example if you have a standard size standard color standard things like that you can actually set it in one place in a power app and have other controls reference that central place so that's really powerful too for making as you create your apps if you take a little extra time to do that then it makes it more efficient going down the road like for example you know having navigation on all your screens and having like just the standard set of navigation if you change in one place just trickles down and changes everywhere I teach all about that in my four-day power apps class that's coming up in a few weeks anyway alright so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna say the I'm gonna give this button a name because when I'm referencing it it needs to actually I meant to call this basics there we go when I'm referencing it it needs to actually you know make sense so it'll help me more when I'm referencing it to remember what it's called instead of just like random button one all right so there's button basics and then sometimes if you have multiple screens and you have like the same button you might want to put like a letter a number at the end of it to indicate to you what screen it's on like use your own little acronyms I do that sometimes alright so then I have so I have this button and I have I'll go ahead and give it a border style that's pretty simple I'm not referencing any other controls yet but the borders gonna look a little different when it's selected just slightly different it's not like a huge big deal so border style is solid border thicknesses too and depending on what theme I picked you're actually going to have some different settings here different default settings like the theme that I picked when I wrote the blog post this morning had no border style and it had no border thickness it and so I actually manually changed these so I guess just pay attention to that okay so disabled color this is where it gets interesting because I'm actually gonna use this disabled functional I'm going to disable this button and I'm going to use the fact that it's disabled to basically indicate whether it looks a certain way so that's gonna I mean the word the fact that it's going to be a disabled control is going to help so when not when I'm on the tab and I'm on the basics tab it's going to be disabled then when I'm on like the contact tab it's gonna be disabled so you don't need to click the tab when you're on that tab right anyway so it's gonna be a disabled button okay so in power apps you have this setting called and I'm just gonna do a quick search for it display mode so the display mode you've got several different display modes I do display MoDOT I can see what they are disabled edit in view so disabled means you can't click on it it doesn't do anything it doesn't doesn't you know on select it doesn't do anything and it means it's actually functional and view means you're just looking at it you're not clicking on it I haven't thoroughly tested the difference between disabled and view but I'm I'm using disabled in this in this context ok so I'm going to skip down to the display mode and I'm gonna say I'm not gonna just say that it's disabled I'm just gonna set it to one or the other I'm actually gonna do a let me put it back where it was let me go up here display mode just gives me a bigger surface to be able to show you guys what I'm doing all right so I'm going to put an if statement in here now if you guys if you're fairly new to power apps there is this pretty little rules pane that lets you have like a nice easy interface for creating some if statements I've gotten to the point where I just do them by typing them in here because it's got its really to me more annoying to try and go through the rules wizard because I guess you know once you got once you get familiar and if you're familiar with Excel like if statements in Excel and you're familiar with formulas like that it's probably going to be easier for you to just type them in here so anyway I'm gonna do an if statement but the result of my if statement needs to equal an actual display mode like edit view or disabled so I'm gonna say if and I'm going to be looking at this variable this variable that I created the form tab if the variable form tab equals basics then disabled otherwise edit tada okay so this means that remember when I click on this it's changing the variable and actually what I'm going to do and you can do this just when you're testing things so you can get more visibility into what's going on I'm just gonna stick a label on this screen and I'm gonna make the label say what's in the variable so now watch when I preview it and I click that see now I can see that it set the variable so I've got a good bit more work to do with like some of the colors and stuff you see it looks a little weird so then I did the display mode display color I'm also going to do I'll make a few references to some other like to itself basically to other properties and I'll show you what that looks like so disabled fill is when this is disabled so it's disabled right now I actually want it to just be the same color as this form because remember in my blog post the tabs look like they kind of blend it in with the form so I'm going to say go straight to the disabled fill like that and oh yeah the radius I'll change the radius in a second dan you're right I love the the radius is what makes it look like a cool little tab huh so disabled Phil I just want it to equal whatever this forms color is so I'm going to select the form I gonna see what it's called SharePoint form one so disabled Phil so if you want a property just equal that you know any property from another control this is all you do SharePoint form one dot fill so it goes to that property and and then you when you click a dot it lets you reference it goes to that control unless you reference any property of that control pretty powerful right is anybody like seeing that concept for the first time where you can reference one property from another or you reference the same property I'm gonna be doing a few more like that but now you can see this is this color alright so let's go ahead and go to the radius because that's like the magic oops radius and I'm just gonna do the radius I'm not gonna do any radiuses on the bottom I'm just gonna do the top left and top right and I'm going to do zero radius as the radius is the curvature so look at that so now it actually looks and we preview it now it actually looks like a curve tab that's the radius I mean that purple is killing me that is who okay yeah okay so then I am going to for my disabled boarder what I can do is I can actually reference itself and I can do this color fade thing so that way instead of having to go set up what color every single thing is like hover color disabled color blah blah blah blah and go set each one of them you can just say whatever color the button is just lets fade that by 20 percent there's 70 percent or whatever so for the disabled border color may do a little search here and disabled border color is not oops I got to select this is not super important it's just like you know visual visual thing so disabled portal border color and it's already got it so it's got color fade of its self border color by 70 percent and that's just out of the box so it's automatically gonna be gonna have a disabled border color that's slightly off from whatever the color of the button is and then the pressed border color just to I'll just take border it's a quick way of just filtering it down press border color is just gonna be the exact same fill color as itself so it's not gonna look any different when you press it I could make it like a light up green or something silly like that when you press it and then let's see I've got hover color which they hover color not harbor border color just hover color I'm just type color narrow it down a little which they're in alphabetical order and then hover color is just the I'm gonna do the button basics in the color just the same color so when you hover over it it's not going to change I could make it change but it's just gonna be pretty static and then however fill is probably out of the box these all pretty pretty much have a lot of these little like color fade things in here ah so annoying when you click on one and it like fills up the hole let me go dum-dum yeah it's fun like searching for these when you there we go so it's just gonna take the color of itself and fade it to 20 percent and then vertical line this is important so vertical line and I can also go over here and do it is I'm going to align it to the top that way since it's a tab it'll have I could you know make it look more like a tab and it's not gonna you know I could actually drag it a little down if I wanted to to make it kind of go behind like that let's see so that's why I lined it to the top and then I probably don't want to have a border at all actually I don't want it I don't want to have a border I don't want to have this gray border at least because I don't want to see like any division between these two right so I'll probably just want to get rid of you might want to just get rid of all the but borders but what I could do is to make it look smooth and still let it have a border I can like drag it down a little bit and if you want to drag it down even smaller amount or up and up or down you can use your arrow keys see I just use my arrow keys to move it up a little bit so it doesn't like jump up so I can go to this form I'm gonna select the form getting a little nitpicky here you can spend hours of your life doing this stuff I'm gonna go to the forum and I'm just gonna do a good boarder and this has got no border so I don't have to worry about the forum having a border and then I want the form to be in front of the button so that we don't see this bottom border so I go to the Home tab and reorder it and bring the form forward I need to bring the form in front of the button why is it not doing it they bring forward maybe I should need to send that one backward it's gonna be easier there okay so now that I sent it backwards see looks it looks a lot smoother I'll preview it and it's still got a border but it's anyway it's kind of nice so now let that set up I can go ahead and copy it and paste it and do another one and there are a couple of things to change like I mentioned in my blog post I can do I can call this one let's see what I call it yeah and then a couple of things to change in here so I'm going to set the variable to pto and I'm going to set the one more thing it's the display mode just so that's just two things you have to change when you have copies of this thing now watch this so go now I'm gonna put that one behind the forum don't I but you can see that it looks kind of cool so I'll go take this button and I need to rename my button to there couple of different places you can do that I'll rename it button pto that and I'll send it backwards there now it's behind the forum so you can see like I kept you know I can make these tabs look different I can make the you know maybe I want the forum itself to be dark and I want the tab to be the gray one so now I've got a couple of tabs I mean show you before I start doing all the cards I'll show you another cool thing you can do and this applies to when you're lining up anything icons column headings anything next to each other in power apps if you want to make it nice easy and standard and replicable then you can actually do math to line it up in the right place so this button is called button basics this button is button pto i'm going to set the x location of the pto button to be so I'm going to say button basics not the same X obviously as the button basics and that's on top of it + button basics dot width so that would put it right next to it if you wanted to put it like right up against it and then I can do like +10 so now that gives me some nice spacing and then each time I add so if I like widen this one then this one would automatically move out of the way so like if I change this width to like 250 see it automatically just adjusted with it pretty cool you like that tip Oh Dan you're right about rules yeah just I'm so over them but I can see their use for like absolute beginners just getting familiar with this but once you start you know writing all the statements and functions yourself then the rules are kind of annoying all right not just limited but annoying because then you have to like figure out what the rules are trying to do and like work around it it's just awkward alright so then I can take PTO and copy that and paste it and then I can another thing let me let me delete that real quick I can set so for the second one before I copy and paste it any references that I need to have to go to other things I need to go ahead and do that so the Y is going to be the exact same Y as the button basics see so and then if I wanted the width to be the same if I wanted them all to be a standard width I could do that too so the trick is not necessarily to create just one button and copy and paste to make a bunch of them but the trick is to once you create your second button or second label or second whatever it is and you put all those little references to the other things in it then when you copy and paste that that's when you it becomes really powerful because then you have all the references built in and things just all fall into place okay so then I've got mine now when I copy and paste this I still need to go change its X reference because now I have this new have this new thing and we call it contact like that and but now it's right on top of that other one so it actually needs to be a button contact and that it's pretty tedious naming all these things but now it's x-axis way down here it's going to be button pto got x + button pto with Papa tada ok now that one needs to go behind I'll just send it backwards there and ok so now we actually have functioning oh I didn't do that didn't do something with the colors basics PTO I didn't change the all those settings those two settings so I need to set the variable to contact those two last buttons were doing the exact same thing I'm gonna go change the display mode to contact where's the displayed over there we go and I did one recently where it was like more like a wizard next next next and I instead of having the wizard set it to like the name of a tab like I'm doing here I actually had it just set the variable made it a number and it just set the number to like blonde and then set it to two and three in that way you could do like if the variables like greater than this number then show you know a certain form or a certain box or whatever alright so now I've got all those lined up and they function now the fun part is deciding what fields need to go on what tab so I select a card I don't even have to unlock my cards so this that's what makes this super simple is that I don't have to do anything crazy I don't even have to unlock these all I'm doing is just going to the visible so now visible just has to be true or false so whatever if statements or anything like that that you do in here if you put a variable the answer has to be just true or false so keep that in mind when you're writing any kind of formula in visible or anything that anything in here that needs to or false like that so visible is true only if it's on the basics tab do I want visible to be true so I'm just gonna say variable form tab equals basics okay so now variable form tab does equal basics so that the answer to that little formula is true so therefore it's showing so then when I go to preview this and flip over here so now it's hidden go back to basics it shows again oh you'll like that it's pretty awesome do we do we have more anybody else joining a joeld can you let those people in that filled out the form think we have a few more okay cool that's a lot it was like whoa that's a big list okay welcome everyone who's new glad to have you all right so now and you can see up here that those are changing to all right and we don't really need that but that was really just to show you what the value of that variable is okay so then we go just go to each different field card and decide what the you know what tab we want to show it on so whatever tab we want to show it on we just put that as the visible so go visible and then request date that's a pretty basic visible and then Department yeah doing any questions Joelle okay cool so then for PTO I can say so for the ones that I want to be on PTO one their visible is gonna be formed tab equals PTO and notice that as soon as I did this as soon as I do it if I'm on the tab that they're not supposed to be showing on they'll disappear so watch this is a little just weird trick that you have to do is so I select the reason card and I go change my only put on PTO grab that and put it in here put in the clipboard and then notice that it disappeared because it immediately that that is false but I'm still I still have it selected so even if you have a control that's hidden you can still select it and do stuff with it and power up so just pay attention that you still have that card selected when you change it to not be visible so you'll have to actually like click away from it to go click on the next one to go select it and cards unfortunately a lot of controls in here lets you select multiple but cards don't let you select multiple so it's just kind of tedious where you just have to go from card to card and change them like that and I'll just put mmm you have to click away from it click two notes visible and then for the contact so these are gonna be click away from that contact name and then I can also rearrange these to whatever order I put them in just by dragging them here they're you know different ways you can rearrange them that's what order they're going to show just when I get to that cart with to that tab so my visible I have so much fun stuff I've been doing the power apps the last couple of weeks y'all it's it's been a blast then this is just one of the things that I figured out maybe I'll ask my customer and they I can see if we can share that with you all it's pretty fun stuff but when you take my class raise your hand if you're taking my class in a couple of weeks we're gonna be I mean it's like what a 16-hour class 16 hours over 4 days you're gonna learn so much and the key behind what we're gonna be doing in the class is that I'm not so like this is just like a little trick that I'm showing you like the thing with tabs I just feel like this is just a little quick trick that you follow the instructions and now you have tabs well in the class you're actually going to learn all this stuff so you will inherently know how to figure out things like this so you don't have to just you know blog and Google how to do like one specific thing here and there you will just be one with power apps and you'll just like understand it inherently so alright so request status that's gonna be like a status field that I'd want to just show maybe I'd want to show that on the front hadn't really decided I could actually have an approval tab too and I can do I can make an approval tab and I can have like maybe a condition on the approval tab to only show when the status equals a certain thing so I can do some more advanced things in here with that see so let's go trick try this out oh and then one of the last thing that I covered in the blog post was that you want this to actually default to you know a tab when when people first open the forum so you have to select the forum and the whole screen sorry you have to select the whole screen and go to let me clear this little search out over here select the whole screen and go to the on on start is for the whole app and on start is whatever you put in here is like a forum load rule for InfoPath it's just gonna run and that's gonna be on like whatever your first screen is down the left here and on starts just when the app starts on visible is going to be whatever screen you're on when people arrive on that screen what's going to happen so i'ma say set this variable to basics all right and then some of these I didn't put I didn't put like I didn't select any for the controls that I didn't select and on anything in the visible they're just going to show they're no matter what so I might want to actually create a an approval tab here let's go ahead and do that since we've got 20 minutes right yeah it would be nice Nando if you didn't have to change visible but this is so much easier than patching right Dan so much easier than patching and that's where the alternative so I mean that's the visible thing is your way of defining which field is going to show like that's in one in one way or another you have to click on each field to say whether it's going to show or not so that's the visible thing is what we do alright I'll go ahead and add another tab and make this approval I'll just call it approve and I'll call it approve ooh you know what I could do I wonder if I could just set the variable to be like whatever the value of the text is on it let me call me PT and and that can be saving even more time so you follow what I just said all right set that to and then beauty improve dot text uh-huh now let's see what that looks like that might actually be even more efficient way you like that yes Stacy right on start is for the whole app just when the whole app starts up and on visible is every time you go visit that particular screen let me try that because I actually might have figured out a better me so what am I going to show them to show the variable town rebel forum tab oh yeah look at that you'll see what I did okay I'm gonna do it on these other ones too so instead of having to put the word Basics in like I typed the word Basics in here so on this tab the text of this tab is basics just in quotes but I'm also saying on select when you click it set the variable to be basics in quotes well guess what I don't need to be to write basics again right I can just say set the variable to button basics dot text and then whatever text is on here that's what it sets it to pretty cool so it's more even more efficient you like that okay there's a delay so after wait a few seconds but I need it all flat yeah it's so much fun like I'm having such a blast of this thing all right so I'm going to go ahead and move this back so it's behind and so let's go let me go back to what I was doing so I set the variable to whatever text is on it and then what is that other thing when I did with the if variables form tab equals whatever the name of this tab is right dot text oops text okay that might be even better so yeah so that's I might have to go update my blog post to change that so if variable form tab equals and then it's just itself yeah it works that's very cool um let's see Eileen status is their performance issue if each tab is looking up the labels you know sometimes I wonder that and I I'm not sure if Dan if you want to chime in if you know anything about the performance but I put like tons of screens and a crap ton of references just all over the place in pretty complex apps and it doesn't seem like it has an impact like that's the way they want you to do it because think about it when when you insert controls any - any time you insert anything in a power F it already has a whole bunch of references over here in the properties that so to me they're encouraging you to use a whole bunch of those and that's the main way that you let's it's a very efficient way to do stuff I'd have to ask I'd have to actually ask like somebody on the power apps team if it would be a performance issue because I've pondered that as well but um I don't think so I hope not yeah that would be frustrating if it was because it's pretty powerful functionality right alright so that is cool I'm glad I figured that out that's pretty neat and then you can make the tooltip can I make the tooltip equal dot text so that's kind of redundant though if you make the tooltip when somebody's hovering over it equal the same thing that it says so I'm not sure if that matters okay so on start it is gonna set this variable to basics and then anyway so let's go ahead and remove that and I was gonna do two I was gonna move this approve over because I've got my button approve and I've also got my button contact and the approve needs to be to the right of the contact button so I got to finish moving that over so the X is going to be Oh so Dan says he agrees it shouldn't affects performance I would think it would actually it maybe would make it more efficient you would think because then you have less quantity of settings everywhere button content doc width and then oh I didn't need to do that I was looking for X sorry I'm gonna do this approval thing and we're gonna like just work through that unless y'all have any questions that's the whole fun of doing this live is that oops is that you guys can we can chat and have a whole conversation and have questions what we do it and use your tab button like once you see the thing that you want to select you can just hit tab and it will if it's the first thing it will select it for you so now it moved it over and then approve is make sure so set the variable blah blah blah and then the display equals let's see but text alright it's a variable equals whatever text is on the button then it's disabled so let's see yeah there we go all right so the approved tabs gonna have a couple of other ones on it like I'll just put request status it's gonna be the visible variable form tab equals approved oh no I couldn't do the I couldn't do a reference in that one cuz it's not itself it's just I'm looking at it's a card okay just copy that and then approver approver comments you know me I like to keep the whole approval process in the form and not have to have a bunch of extraneous tasks and things floating around everywhere so that's why these fields exist okay one more time doo doo doo doo and then approve we can make that so that it doesn't show until the request status is does it say approver approve approved no it would need to be oh yeah it would need to be pending right okay so let me say that and don't forget so saving it just saves your changes and then publishing it publish to SharePoint actually publish this out so people can go ahead and use it but they that's the nice thing about this that InfoPath didn't have is that you can keep working on it and saving changes and not have that have to be the live form Stacy says anyone else notice I'm working with multiple large SharePoint lists an app the dots never stopped going across the top of the app well you've got that 500 limit Stacy so I've got one that I've been doing that I just ended up doing a collection um I would I would encourage I don't know Stacy if you like whatever galleries you're using and where you're showing all those however many items they are encourage like filtering and searching and not try and show them all I don't know but that's yeah that's definitely Carlos says can the function have an or clause to allow you to show a field or multiple tabs yes or is two pipes okay so it saved it let me go ahead and I'm gonna click back to SharePoint okay so I'm gonna go change this request status yeah Chris status to be you know what I'm gonna show you guys okay so this one power app that I'm working on right now they're not gonna it's it's not a SharePoint they're not it's not a customized list form in SharePoint they're not gonna be going to SharePoint so everything's gonna be done in power apps and technically with this one with a customized list form everything's going to be done in power apps - so have you noticed that we just open this in a new tab real quick the little drop the drop-down boxes are a little slow like reason one to tip well it takes a few seconds even when it's just a couple of things it takes a few seconds well that's weird how it like smushed it over to the side of the screen like that I could have sworn I made it wider anyway there's a you can actually use just a drop-down box without having to use those out-of-the-box ones so I'm not sure I don't think I have time to do that but you could just create a drop-down box from scratch especially if it's just like a couple of things that you need to have in it so that it doesn't take a few seconds going and looking at a chair point for those values but because choice fields people field lookup fields and managed metadata those are all complex fields and those all you have to have you have to do like special things for them and you have to you know they're harder to filter and sort by and your galleries and they're harder to do in formulas and they're just kind of a pain so if you could avoid it if you could avoid things being choice fields especially because those are easy you can make them line up seeing a lot of text you could actually do more with them in the in your forms in your apps request status there we go I had gone to the the other version of this form new pending all right so I'll do yeah so now there's my form see it's big I was on the other list just now when I did that oh that's a gigantic oh that's ridiculous so yeah that's another thing you can do is go in there and make all the font smaller but you have to do that one thing at a time and you can create a central like one that you set up and have the other ones reference it but if it's inside of a card it's kind of it's just kind of a pain because you can't just select a whole bunch of them and when they're inside of a card so here's me filling out my form real quick and my request status I need it I really need to default that to new all right okay so that's what it looks like finished and so then we can it we could actually do go customize it some more if we wanted to and go I'll just show you we'll do one more thing on that tab like we were talking about with not only you have to click on the approve tab of the proof the approved tabs itself isn't even going to show unless it's basically pending approval so the approved tab is gonna have visible so if see request status whose quest status yeah yeah no I gotta go see what that control was called so let's go to the request status I want to just broke the tab because I didn't finish typing my formula in it true bring it back come back okay request status what is this box this box is data card value 15 and I can go Reem name and I can call it value or I could call it drop dr okay you like put a acronym in front of it for drop-down box so i'm gonna reference this so I'm gonna say visible if we're gonna call it tell you request status don't value equals pending no I don't even need a doing if I'm just gonna say that request is there so it's not pending okay so now let's go change it so how am I gonna change it depending if it's not showing it let me go you know change it to pending like in datasheet view or something like that like you would be doing this something like this via workflow like actually moving it from status to status or you could use patching so in this power app that I've been using doing the past couple weeks I've actually completely avoiding having to use any workflows or flows and I'm just using patching and just direct email from the direct from the power apps from the power app itself and not doing any workflows so yeah so I could say when someone submits this if you know if certain condition and then set this certain text box for the status to sort by ru et cetera but as you can see that kid that box so I can go how do i unhide it though after I've hidden it so I have to go actually click to go find that have to go find that tab good thing I named it something useful yeah oh okay okay thanks yeah I'm wrapping up okay um yeah let me just change this real quick to pending right now you know I usually have it's pretty formal at the beginning of power hour and I do like something very specific and go through steps but then after that I pretty much just you know let's just see what we can figure out okay so now the request status is pending so now let's just go change that so value requests below blah equals pending so now see it's actually showing so that's how you can make that whole tab only show so that's a really good way of kind of locking down your app I could also do user like if you have one particular user now it's not usually necessarily a good idea to hard-code people names into an app but if you have a form that you literally just have one person that's doing the approvals and it's not a big deal you could say user email equals and I could say actually this one is this other email address so then yeah oh yeah see there it is so if the logged in users email addresses that then it would show it so that's kind of like security by obscurity you're not really actually securing anything but you're making it so that they can't get to those fields or see them if they can't click on the button right all right I'll go ahead and wrap that up let me go ahead and just save that I wish it were easier to have power-ups look at share point groups are groups in general I mean Hakeem use office 365 groups but there's this really long let me switch my screen over here this really long complicated set of instructions for making it so that you can actually use security trimming in your power app you have to do some stuff in Azure and Azure Active Directory so that basically the end result is that you get a special connection you can use that lets you you can use it in your power apps that tells you what ad groups the currently logged-in user is in I just basically googled like you know power apps ad groups permissions or something like that and it's a it's a Microsoft official piece of documentation but it is very long and complex and you have to have you have to be an ad administrator you have to have access to all that stuff and you have to be able to go through and create an azure function and do a lot of special stuff but other than that power apps doesn't see SharePoint groups or know that they exist or know what groups that the logging user is in and it doesn't know what ad groups a lot of users in alright well I'm gonna go ahead and wrap it up thank you so much let's see what let me see what other questions you guys have um [Music] so Dan yeah you can do a table you can do a little table control inside of your let me see if I have an example of one of those actually it's basically a it's it's out there on the power-ups documentation it's just like a little table with the curly brackets in it and you just tell it what all the different values are and you just put that as you have to insert you're not using a lookup field because this is a lookup field I'm not even using that I'm just a leaving a lookup field and I'm inserting a drop-down and in the dropdowns list of items that's where you're putting this table reference so that's that's what I like to do - awesome thanks everybody for coming and I'm not sure what we're doing next week on power our lights it might have something to do with power ups we'll see maybe flow um I've been figuring out so much fun stuff and power apps lately that it might be another power apps one but you guys my class is coming up the week of January 29th it's four days online I highly encourage you to check it out it's in those of you who if you've got the newsletter about Power Hour today there's a link to it in there you can check out my website IWM intercom and it is very long class and detailed and we're gonna teach you power apps like backwards and forward and you know not a bunch of little tricks to do but teaching you power apps so that you will understand so you'll be able to figure out the tricks yourself like that little thing that I did with the with a reference to the name of the tab the text on the tab anyway the online classes start at 10:00 central each day Larry and you get a recording of it as well and you have the recording of it for like a year yeah all right cool I will see you guys next time I say over and out

Channel: Laura Rogers

Views: 34,069

Rating: 4.9073358 out of 5

Keywords: SharePoint, Office 365, PowerApps

Id: NdiQ802dG3E

Length: 62min 6sec (3726 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2018