Display Notifications in Canvas Apps Without Re-Deploying Everytime! (Part 2)

To catch up on where we left off in my last blog post, check out part 1 on how to set up your Canvas App with the correct data model that this blog post enhances.

In the first part of this theme we ended with a working set of notifications that could be displayed within the Canvas App using a Dataverse table, however, I decided to leave the cosmetics until part 2 so that I could deliver something unique. Here’s what the Notification area looked like when we finished part 1:

A screenshot of the Power Apps Studio showing our Notification Gallery without any styling. Created as a part of part 1 in this blog.

Let’s take a look at three UI enhancements that we can make for the user to improve their experience, and to bring alerts to their attention!

1. Make the Notifications Gallery Distinctive

Gradients, rounded corners, white space, and minimalist designs are the latest go-to trend in software design – and for good reason too! Using these tricks helps you to focus the user’s mind on to a specific area of the app without overwhelming the user with too much information, whilst other components seem to blend in to the container that the content sits within.

At the time of writing, rounded corners aren’t available in every control and gradients just simply aren’t possible. However, for those of you that are comfortable with inserting CSS through templated means, you’ll be pleased to know that you can use the ‘Html Text’ generate these designs for you.

First of all, we need to choose a colour palette. If you don’t have any experience in working with colours then you can use a combination of the Power Toys’ Colour Picker and/or this Tailwind Colour Generator to create gorgeous modern designs.

Keeping the app on-trend, here are my colour palette options in Power Toys:

A screenshot of Power Toys' Colour Picker showing a range of purples that can be used for a gradient.

And here is the same colour with its colour palette in the Tailwind Colour Generator:

A screenshot of the Tailwind CSS Colour Generator showing a range of purples that can be used for a gradient.

To incorporate these into our app, we need to add the new Html Text Control to the screen and we can use a simple snippet of HTML that wraps around our CSS with our chosen styles. The snippet you’ll need is:

"<div style=""border-radius: 15px; background-image: linear-gradient(#952e8b, #692661); width:100%;height:" & HtmlBg.Height -11
 &"px;""></div>"
  • <div> acts as the ‘block’ that we want to design.
  • border-radius allows us to add rounded corners.
  • background-image allows us to specify our gradient, and lastly,
  • width & height specifies the size of our ‘block’.

Whilst building this I realised that I was seeing a vertical scroll bar on my <div>, so by calculating the height as ‘height of the Html Text Control – 11’ we can make our <div> small enough to fit within the Control and therefore remove the scrollbar.

A screenshot of our newly styled HTML Text Control with purple gradients.

Your screen will now look something like the above, so just remember to right-click on your Html Text Control, navigate to Reorder, and choose Send to back.

2. Adjust the Fonts

Your Notification Gallery will now look far better than before but depending on the colours you have selected for your gradient, it’s unlikely that your text will be visible to the vast majority of individuals, and you may receive accessibility warnings in your App Checker.

Set your Labels’ colour to white (or RGBA(255,255,255,1) for the technical amongst us!), and use bold and underline formatting to make elements of your Notifications panel stand out.

For my example, I have:

  • Set the ‘Notifications:’ Label to size 18px and bold.
  • Set the ‘Date’ Label to size 14 and underlined.
  • Adjusted the main body of the notification text so that the modern Navigation controls fit nicely against the title and footer of the Notifications without taking up too much space.
An updated screenshot of our HTML Text Control, with the Control being moved behind the text, and the text being changed to white for better accessibility.

3. Visualise Information

If you remember from part 1, we had even more information that we wanted to display in this notification panel. We created a Type field that allowed us to specify the severity of the notification. Our objective is to keep this design clean, so instead of adding a Label with the type, perhaps we could provide a circle that shows the severity.

To do this, we need to add a Circle Control to the Gallery Control and our Fill Property is going to be controlled using the Switch Function, which allows us to provide different results based on a series of potential outputs.

Use the following snippet with some well selected colours using Power Toys’ Colour picker again, and each Circle within the Gallery will have a different colour based on its severity, or it’ll be filled white for anything else.

Switch( ThisItem.Type, Type.Information, RGBA(69,164,255,1), Type.Error, RGBA(238,92,54,1), Type.Warning, RGBA(255,232,79,1), Type.Success, RGBA(78,195,74,1), RGBA(255,255,255,1))

To make sure that our colours remain accessible, adding a border to the Circle Control also enhances the look & feel. The end result should look something like this:

A screenshot of our control with a visual indicator showing the severity of the notification.

Conclusion

We’ve now completed our fully styled Notification panel that can be used alongside other Controls in our app! You may want to make some adjustments to your final output, and thankfully this is extremely easy to do using the Properties within your app or further CSS within your Html Text Control, you just need to spend some time testing out what works for you and your company’s brand/style.

If this article helps you and you manage to create something new, please feel free to share your creations in the comments!

A screenshot showing the before and after of the styling of the Notification panel.

Display Notifications in Canvas Apps Without Re-Deploying Everytime! (Part 1)

If you manage a suite of Power Apps internally, sometimes you need to get information to individuals fast and without making a change to the software! Whilst there are always alternatives such as sending a Teams message or an email, often the best route is to actually tell the end user within the app itself next time they open the app. I’ve had this a few times recently in ‘operations’ settings:

  • When a date specific event is upcoming and your end users may not be sure what to do with their data entry, such as a bank holiday in a time entry system.
  • When the ‘window’ into the application receives a software update and causes a slightly different user experience. Especially if your Power App is a Teams tab – you have to think about the screen, OS, Teams, and Power Apps scaling before you even think about the dimensions of your controls!
  • When a known bug causes issues for multiple issues, you may want to inform your users that you are aware and that a fix is in progress.
  • When a system may require maintenance and you plan to take it offline or reduce its functionality temporarily.
  • When you simply want to notify end users of important bulletin items.

The notification functionality in Canvas Apps is great, but as it’s written in Power Fx, if you follow the examples given in the official material then you would need to re-deploy your app across environments to change the content. Not only is this time consuming, but it also introduces other risks if you have dependencies on other solutions.

To avoid this, we can use a trick similar to what has been used in model-driven apps with drop-down functionality for years – we can introduce a custom table to dynamically retrieve the data, and convert this functionality from configuration into data administration.

Note: I have the pleasure of being a Global Administrator with a premium Power Apps license, but not everyone will! This example uses Microsoft Dataverse, but the solution is also achievable in SharePoint and other data sources if you wish and therefore in the rest of this post I have focussed on the curation of the solution, as opposed to Dataverse understanding and navigation. This wouldn’t cause a licensing concern from Microsoft as this is entirely bespoke functionality designed to do make deployment easier and this solution will not reduce your general licensing requirements.

Create a Custom System Notification Table

I know it’s tempting, but do not head over to ‘Tables’ in https://make.powerapps.com, and head over to ‘Solutions’ instead. This will help you in the long run, as you’ll want your app to be in the same solution as your new table.

Create a new Solution to hold your components (or choose your app’s existing solution if you have already started building) and create a new Table called System Notification.

A screenshot showing the creation of a Custom Table called System Notificaiton in Microsoft Dataverse.

This will then create a table for you with a Primary Column called Name.

Configure the System Notification Table’s Columns

The variation you choose here is entirely up to you depending on your requirements, you could simply use just the Name column and delete entries when they are no longer relevant, or, you could create a Release Date and Expiry Date field to automatically show and hide notifications based on your filter criteria in the app. I would recommend:

  • Increasing the length of Name to 250 chars
  • Create a Date Only field called Release Date
  • Create a Date Only field called Expiry Date
  • Create a Choice field called Type with the options Information, Error, Warning, and Success
A screenshot showing the Expiry Date Column being created in the System Notification Table in Microsoft Dataverse.

Create the Data

Now is the time to head over to Tables from your left-hand navigation, so let’s find the new System Notifications Table and amend the columns slightly so that we can add a few records for use in our app.

A screenshot showing the entering of data into the System Notification Table in Microsoft Dataverse

Introduce the Table to your Canvas App

Head back to your solution, and either create a new Canvas App or open up your existing app in Edit mode. Connect to your data, and add a new Collection into the OnStart Property of your app to retrieve your System Notifications data.

A screenshot of a new Canvas App collecting data from the System Notifications Table, using the OnStart Property and the Clearcollect function

If you’re using the same naming conventions as me, you can copy the following code:

ClearCollect(ColNotif, 'System Notifications')

From here you have a couple of options, and the logic for the data is similar but the construction of its presentation will be different.

You could proceed to use the Notify functionality, but the challenge is around predicting the response and engagement from the end user. If the message is important, but you have multiple that the user keeps having to dismiss, they may end up getting extremely frustrated and just click the X endlessly whilst missing the notification. Instead, we will create a gallery.

Show your Notifications Using a Gallery

Insert a new Vertical Gallery control to initially display your ColNotif Collection.

A screenshot of the default view of a Vertical Gallery in Canvas Apps, with the ColNotif Collection showing data.

You’ll want to amend your Gallery to provide more of a bulletin-style or notification-style feel. Here are some suggestions:

  • Remove the image placeholder and adjust your labels so that the Name takes up the majority of the content area.
  • Add the Release Date a Label to the Gallery Item.
  • Remove the chevron icon.
  • Switch the scrollbar to navigation for a more modern feel.
  • Make the Gallery more compact, and shift its location to the top-left or top-right of the canvas.
  • Reduce the font sizes.
A screenshot showing a cleaner version of the Notification Gallery in the Canvas App

Quality Improvements

The bare bones of the functionality is complete! Stay tuned for part 2 where I will explain how to make use of the Columns that we configured earlier to take your notifications to the next level!

Display a Random Collection Item in Canvas Apps

When we’re building Canvas Apps, one of the most important factors in your design is whether you can give your users a reason to come back to your app. Some of these solutions may be sophisticated, such as automated notifications that prompt the user to check the application when updates are made, but others can be ‘nice to have’ or whimsical just to satisfy an end user’s curiosity and to have a little fun.

Amongst other features built in this internal Canvas App, today I wanted to experiment with selection of random collection items, and I thought ‘what better way to do this than to show a quote to the end user that differs every single time that the user logs in?’. No two users would ever see the same quote at the same time unless it was by pure chance.

Here’s a short explainer on how I achieved the end result.

Step 1: Create a Collection of Inspirational Quotes!

There’s nothing particularly special about this Collection except that we’ve assigned a value to every quote. This is absolutely critical, as we’re going to use a function that requires a numeric value shortly.

You should create your collection within the OnStart Property of the App, as this will ensure that your quotes are ready to be randomised when the home screen loads.

A screenshot of a Collection within the Power App, which holds a Quote and an assigned Value.

Step 2: Create the Label control to randomise the quote shown.

By combining a few functions, we can request that our Canvas App sets the label to one of many random quotes from the collection every time the app loads.

LookUp(QuotesCol,Value = RandBetween(1,6), Name)
  • The Lookup function allows us to return the Name value from the QuotesCol collection, and,
  • Using the RandBetween function within the Lookup allows us to grab a random quote that has a Value between 1 & 6 to identify the correct Name value to display.

Step 3: Run OnStart to test the functionality.

And that’s it! Right-click on the three dots next to the App heading in Tree view and you’ll see a random quote appear within your Label control.

A screenshot showing the finished app with a random quote from the collection being displayed.

Final Thoughts…

Now this example was extremely simple and quite amusing to build, but the point of this exercise was to add yet another reason for my end users to come back to the app, whilst also learning a little more about how you can use functions to identify one item in a Collection dynamically.

As this data was extremely limited I chose to store my data in the Collection itself, but in most cases, you’d probably want to create the Collection from a SharePoint List or Microsoft Dataverse to have better control over the data you’re using.

Customise Data Shown in Dropdown Controls in Canvas Apps

When you use a dropdown control within a Canvas App it can be surprisingly tricky to show exactly what you want as an option unless the data already exists as a value in your data source. I assume that the reason for this is that dropdown controls are most commonly used within forms, and therefore the options available need to be valid for your submission otherwise your data entry will fail.

Dropdown controls have other uses too such as filtering data within a Table or a Gallery, and in this situation, you may need the data displayed under your control based on processing within the Canvas App itself. Last week I needed to do exactly that!

The Challenge

I am currently building a small timesheet approvals app, and the dropdown I wanted to create needed to display a list of people with an indication to the end user of how many unapproved time entries there were for that person. Afterall, if 40% of people had no unapproved time, it would be really frustrating for the end user to endlessly click on people to find that they have no time entries awaiting approval. In my example, I was using data from a Collection that was getting data from a table in another data source holding delivery resources, and I could choose any of the following fields but I couldn’t do anything else as the Value Property is not available for me to modify with Power Fx.

A screenshot of a dropdown control within a Canvas App allowing me to pick any of the available fields from the Collection.

This may not be a problem in other use cases as the people with approved time could be disregarded from the Collection by filtering on Delivery Resources where ‘unapprovedcount’ is 1 or more, but this won’t work for me with the app’s requirements so I had to seek another solution so that I could show ‘name’ and ‘unapprovedcount’ as one dropdown item.

The Solution

The workaround for this was relatively simple, but trying to find resources on how to achieve it was proving tricky! Given that we have already created a Collection from the data source called ColDeliveryResources, we simply need to create a second Collection based on this to add a column to the existing data, and in this particular case I needed to also sort by the number of unapproved timesheet entries too. By doing this in the OnStart property of the app, we can use Power Fx here to define a new column that we can select within the Value property of the Dropdown control:

First Collection

//Collects all resources from the Delivery Resources table to use across the app.

ClearCollect(ColDeliveryResources, ShowColumns('Delivery Resources',"name","resourceid", "email", "unapprovedcount"));

Second Collection

//Collects the results from ColDeliveryResources and adds a column to each one combining 'name' and 'unapprovedcount'. For example, 'Aaron Gumbs (9)'. Once this has been achieved, we sort the names from highest number of time entries unapproved to lowest so that the end user can prioritise their workload.

ClearCollect(DropdownDisplay, SortByColumns(AddColumns(ColDeliveryResources, "displayname", Concatenate(name," (", unapprovedcount,")")),"unapprovedcount",Descending));

Final Result

Once I had run OnStart and my new collection was available, I simply needed to swap out the original Collection for the new one in the ‘Items’ Property of the Dropdown control, and ‘displayname’ became available to select, allowing me to finally show both ‘name’ and ‘unapprovedcount’ on the screen as shown below.

A screenshot of my timesheet approvals app, showing a dropdown control with 'Aaron Gumbs' written in it, indicating that he has 9 unapproved timesheet entries.

Calculate ‘Total Days This Month’ Using Power Fx

New year, new challenge!

This week I was asked to adapt one of our internal Canvas Apps that was used for an exercise challenge in December to track miles, so that the leaderboard resets to ‘0 miles’ at the beginning of each month. Our team’s goal is to log the miles run or walked within the month, with the aim to contribute at least one mile per day of the month.

One of the features I delivered was a progress bar, but I wanted this progress bar to change based upon the duration of the month. Amongst other dynamic calculations, the width of the progress bar I want should be “total number of days in the month multiplied by 10”, and it looks something like this:

A screenshot of Aaron's running progress for January, showing his profile picture, 15 miles of 31 miles complete in a progress bar, and a message saying "15 miles down, keep going Aaron!".

As we are all well aware, the length of months aren’t consistent, and in my app progress should be ‘higher’ in February if I have run 15 miles in 28 days, as opposed to running 15 miles in March which has 31days. In February the width should be 280px and in March it should be 310px.

To my surprise there wasn’t an existing Power Fx function that could achieve this but I was able to do this myself with the following solution. For someone who writes Power Fx regularly, I found this quite difficult to explain whilst writing the one statement, so hopefully the following explanation that breaks down the formula can help you too.

Constructing the Formula

I’m using the last day of the month in multiple places in my Canvas App, so I don’t quite want to create the final value (the multiplication by 10 for the width of the progress bar) just yet. For now, let’s start our formula by declaring a new variable called varDaysInThisMonth in the OnStart Property of the Canvas App.

//Create the variable varDaysInThisMonth with an empty string.

Set(varDaysInThisMonth,"")

We then want to identify the last day of the month, but there’s also no direct formula for this either! We can use a little trick to achieve this by finding out the first day of next month, and then take away one day from the value.

Let’s do this by constructing the date for the first day of this month, and then add one month to the value. Please note that we need to make the Year and Month value dynamic here, otherwise we’ll end up with bad data in later months.

//Given that the current date is in January, construct the first day of the month using Date (01/01/2023) and return the value "01/01/2023" by adding one month.

Set(varDaysInThisMonth, DateAdd(Date(Year(Today()),Month(Today()),1),1,Months))

We now know the first day of the next month, so now we just need to subtract one day from this value to find out the last day of this month by wrapping a new DateAdd formula around our existing DateAdd formula.

//Given that the output above is "01/01/2023", return the value "31/01/2023" by adding -1 days.

Set(varDaysInThisMonth, DateAdd(DateAdd(Date(Year(Today()),Month(Today()),1),1,Months)), -1, Days)

In this situation the last day of the month is returned, which may be enough for some of you trying to achieve a similar calculation. In order to finally turn this in to the total number of days in this month, we just need to wrap our DateAdd calculation in a Day formula, which takes the “31” from “31/01/2023”.

//Given that the output above is "31/01/2023", return the total number of days this month, which equates to "31".

Set(varDaysInThisMonth, Day(DateAdd(DateAdd(Date(Year(Today()),Month(Today()),1),1,Months),-1,Days)))
A screenshot of Power Apps studio showing the OnStart Property and the formula constructed in its final form.

And there we have it! Personally, I found this more difficult than I expected to. I know other similar languages used in Excel and Power BI allow for simpler calculations than this, and I’d be interested in whether you’ve found a quicker way to achieve this!

The last step for me was to simply change the Width Property of the grey rectangle acting as the background of the progress bar alongside the formula for the with of the actual progress shown in the green rectangle by using this constructed variable.

A screenshot of the Power Apps Studio showing the Width Property of the grey rectangle acting as the progress bar's background.

Fact check: In this article Aaron implied that he has run 15 miles in January. This is completely false, Aaron would never run 15 miles within one month!

Handling Missing User Profile Photos in Canvas Apps

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time working with photos in Canvas Apps in order to create more of a visual impact in my user interface design. Often this photo can come from the Office 365 User’s profile photo upload but we can’t necessarily predict or control whether the end user will definitely have a photo uploaded.

In this example I wanted to use data from Shifts to show who is going to be on annual leave this week, and the code that I am using to retrieve the photo is as follows where ‘userId’ is the column to identify the user in the list of Shifts records.

Office365Users.UserPhotoV2(Text(ThisItem.userId))

The Power Fx formula tries to obtain the photo based upon the userId of the returned Gallery Item. Immediately we receive an error and depending on the way that you’re trying to identify the Office365User, this error can vary, sometimes showing ‘resource not found’ too!

A screenshot of a canvas app displaying an error due to an invalid error for the 'id' parameter.

The reason for this error is that the Canvas App doesn’t know what to show as the image if it can’t find the Office365Users’ photo. Whilst this doesn’t seem significant right now as other images are showing, it will prevent any proceeding functions from behaving correctly and your end users may have a degraded user experience when running the app.

A screenshot of the Canvas app showing errors on the canvas and in the notification bar explaining that the photo could not be found.

Fortunately we can fix this with some minor edits.

Use IfError to Control the Situation

The IfError function is a way to identify whether an error occurs and what the ‘fallback’ should be in that particular event. We use IfError as opposed to IsError as this formula is specifically designed to revert to an alternative if the error occurs, whereas if we use IsError, we would need to combine this with an If statement and repeat parts of our code because IsError only returns whether an error actually occurred. I have used IfError as shown below:

IfError(Office365Users.UserPhotoV2(ThisItem.userId),SampleImage)

By adapting our previous snippet of code and using SampleImage as the fallback, this guarantees that we will not see a system error for this particular reason moving forward, and that a placeholder image will be shown for any users that do not have a profile picture. All proceeding code can execute with no problems too.

A screenshot of the canvas app showing error handling and a placeholder image if the photo could not be found for the Office 365 User.

This also increases the perception of quality. Showing a placeholder image instead of a blank circle indicates that there is data that has been returned rather than giving the impression that something hasn’t loaded.

As you’d expect though, it’s difficult to tell who this person is with the placeholder image showing, so it’d be worth adding an additional identifier such as the Office365Users’ Display Name underneath the photo too. This can easily be done with the Office365Users Connector with the following code, but I haven’t shown it in this example as I was working with real data.

Office365Users.UserProfileV2(ThisItem.userId).displayName

References

Microsoft Learn | Error, IfError, IsError, IsBlankOrError functions in Power Apps

Create a Rolling Calendar Year in Canvas Apps

Earlier this week I had a requirement to create a screen that would help others forecast an activity for the next 12 months. Whilst I was happy working with the data model, ensuring that the year was based on this month and the next eleven was more difficult than I anticipated. I suspect that this is because of my previous work with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement & model-driven apps, where ‘Next X Months’ is a common and native reporting query, so I haven’t really had to think about it too much.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can create your own, and feel free to adapt this to use days or years instead!

Add a Gallery Control to your Screen

As calendars are visual, let’s add a Gallery control to the screen as this will enable us to create user interface effects that you’d typically see within a calendar-style control. At this moment in time, we won’t add a data source.

A screenshot of a Canvas App with a Horizontal Gallery control using the CustomGallerySample list of Items

I would recommend a Horizontal Gallery control for this example so that we can see the next 12 months across the screen with no scrolling necessary.

Create a Collection to Store Months

Now this is where the real work starts! We’re going to need to create a Collection which recognises today’s date and then shows the proceeding 11 months. This may initially look complicated, but it’s just two distinct lines of code and then a copy of the second line with very small amendments for each month.

ClearCollect(MonthsList, {Name: Text(Today(),"mmmm"), Month: Month(Today()), Year: Year(Today())}, 
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),1,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),1, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),1, Months))},

As you can see from the above partial Power Fx code, we need to:

  • Collect a list of months called MonthList.
  • Store the name of the month by converting the month’s value to text using the Text format “mmmm”.
  • Store the date’s month’s value (January = 1, February = 2, etc.) using Month.
  • Store the date’s year value using Year.
  • Create the next item in the Collection by wrapping the code above in the DateAdd Power Fx code, incrementing by one each time.

💡Whilst it may not seem purposeful at the moment, storing the month’s value will help us if we need to query data when selecting one of the gallery items and mitigate the risk of delegation!

A screenshot of a Canvas App with a new collection called MonthList which collects values for this month and the proceeding 11 months.

Here’s the full code snippet:

ClearCollect(MonthsList, {Name: Text(Today(),"mmmm"), Month: Month(Today()), Year: Year(Today())}, 
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),1,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),1, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),1, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),2,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),2, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),2, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),3,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),3, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),3, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),4,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),4, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),4, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),5,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),5, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),5, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),6,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),6, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),6, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),7,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),7, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),7, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),8,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),8, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),8, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),9,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),9, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),9, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),10,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),10, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),10, Months))},
{Name: Text(DateAdd(Today(),11,Months),"mmmm"), Month: Month(DateAdd(Today(),11, Months)), Year: Year(DateAdd(Today(),11, Months))}
);

Technically speaking, we’re not actually working with Months and Years directly here, we’re adding one month to the current date for every item. Whilst we don’t see it on the screen, if today’s date is the 13th November 2022, then the calculation for the second item in the Collection is actually splitting values from the 13th December 2022, and so on. This doesn’t matter though, as we aren’t manipulating or using Day values anywhere in this example.

Associate the Gallery and the Collection

This is relatively straight forward, the hard work is now done. Head over to your Gallery and replace the Items Property with MonthsList, and then run the OnStart Property from your App control in the Tree View.

A screenshot of the Canvas App showing the dynamic data associated with the controls provided by the Horizontal Gallery.

Depending on how you’ve adapted this example, you may see errors on the screen or your may see unnecessary controls. This is ok. This is the canvas trying to associate everything that you have with the controls provided for the custom data.

Get Styling!

  • Removed the Image control.
  • Replaced Subtitle2’s data with the date’s Year value.
  • Added a thin Rectangle control to separator data.
  • Added the month’s value underneath the separator just to show how you could display more data.
  • Added a ‘fill’ for the selected Gallery Item so that you can visually identify which month has been clicked by the user using the code below within the Fill property of a Rectangle:
If(ThisItem.IsSelected, RGBA(255, 191, 0, 1), RGBA(0,0,0,0))
A screenshot of the Canvas App with the finished rolling calendar view, showing all of the data that we collected earlier in a styled Horizontal Gallery control.

Final Thoughts

And there we have it, a fully dynamic month selector that will change based on the month we are currently in. There are several ways that you could possibly adapt this to either add more dynamic complexity, by creating a second gallery below that is controlled by the selector we’ve just produced – this is actually what I had to do for the client, but I can’t show you that as the data was far too specific!

I’ve also discussed the creation of this collection with a few colleagues this week and I couldn’t find anything more efficient to dynamically calculate the rolling months, so I would be really keen to hear your suggestions in the comments below if you have any.

Visualise Your Day’s Meetings in Canvas Apps

With Microsoft expanding their suite of apps every month, it can be difficult to create the right view of data for you to personally consume without context switching. Recently I have been exploring the Office365Outlook Connector in Canvas Apps to bring a day view of my calendar into a Power App alongside information from other meeting & task related content that I consume on a regular basis, and here are a few tips on how I created the solution.

Collect the data.

Now, I’m breaking all of the rules here. This is not low-code and it requires a relatively complex collection in order to gather the correct data, and time zones can be a pain too. Let’s break it down into the Power Fx formula that we’re going to focus on:

  1. ClearCollect: We need to create a new collection for our data and treat Office365Outlook.GetEventsCalendarViewV3 as the source for everything that we need.
  2. Office365Outlook.GetEventsCalendarViewV3: Given that the Office365Outlook.GetEventsCalendarViewV3 data requires a start and end, we need to define our duration of appointments. Now in my tenant unfortunately my time zone is offset by one hour compared to the data stored against the calendar entry, but I really want to avoid any appointments for the next day so I’m going to need to bear this in mind when creating my filter by adding 22.5 hours. I am deliberately leaving this in my solution, because I am sure that there are alternatives to resolving this issue, but this is the reality with working within constraints that you don’t have full control over.
  3. SortByColumns: We will also want to sort our data in ascending order to ensure that we see the correct flow of information.
  4. ShowColumns: Finally, we want to limit the data initially retrieved too, as this data set can be quite large and include columns that you are very unlikely to use. More information on this can be read in my previous post here: Reduce Columns Created in a Collection in Canvas Apps

In order to achieve all of the above in these particular circumstances, we need to write the following Power Fx code in the OnStart property of the App.

ClearCollect(
    MyMeetings,
    SortByColumns(
        ShowColumns(
            Office365Outlook.GetEventsCalendarViewV3(
                "Enter Your Calendar's ID here.",
                Text(
                    DateTimeValue(Today()),
                    DateTimeFormat.LongDateTime
                ),
                Text(
                    DateTimeValue(
                        DateAdd(
                            Today(),
                            1350,
                            TimeUnit.Minutes
                        )
                    ),
                    DateTimeFormat.LongDateTime
                )
            ).value,
            "start",
            "end",
            "showAs",
            "isAllDay",
            "subject"
        ),
        "start",
        SortOrder.Ascending
    )
);

You can then ‘Run OnStart’…

A screenshot of Power Apps showing the 'Run OnStart' button within the App.

…and then navigate to your Collection to prove that you’re seeing the correct data from the three dots on your command bar.

A screenshot of the MyMeetings Collection showing data from Outlook.

Display the data on the screen.

Now that we are sure that we are collecting the correct data, we can now move towards adding this information into a gallery.

A screenshot of the CustomGallerySample on the Power App's Screen with two available data sources.

Remember that when you’re choosing your data source, you need to choose the “MyMeetings” Collection and not the Office365Outlook connection. This will ensure that you’re loading all of the filtered data from your OnStart formula.

A screenshot of the out-of-the-box attempt to display our Collection's data.

Visualise!

As you can see from the previous image, the attempt at showing our Collection’s data doesn’t exactly provide any benefit or meaning, and it doesn’t look like a calendar at all. Let’s change that with the following requirements:

Show the Outlook image and a count of the items being displayed on today’s calendar.

We’re going to source the Outlook logo and also add a Label control that counts the rows within our Collection by using the following code:

//X meetings today
Concatenate(CountRows(MyMeetings), " meetings today:")
A screenshot of the Canvas App after adding the Outlook logo and a count of how many meetings we have today.

Show the time of the meeting or whether it’s an All Day Event.

Let’s get rid of that placeholder image and make use of the space that we have. To alternate between All Day Events and the time itself if it’s not all day, we need to write some conditional logic in a Label based on our Collection’s data.

First of all we need to understand whether the isAllDay value is set to true. If it is, we simply need to show the words “All Day”, if it’s not, then urgh! We need to visit time zones and time values again. For this particular example I had to carry out some logic to show the times within a format that looked correct based on my tenant’s time zone, the time zone value set against the meeting, and the local time zone of where I was using the app. This results in the following formula which concatenates “start” and “end” if the isAllDay value is false:

If(ThisItem.isAllDay = true, "All Day",Concatenate(Text(TimeValue(DateAdd(DateTimeValue(ThisItem.start),TimeZoneOffset(Now())*-1,Minutes))), " ",Text(TimeValue(DateAdd(DateTimeValue(ThisItem.end),TimeZoneOffset(Now())*-1,Minutes)))))
A screenshot of the Power App's "All Day" identifier within the Gallery.

Indicate the meeting’s status.

Now this is my favourite part of the solution. We could show the status using words as shown in the Gallery so far, or why don’t we assign an indicator a specific colour based on the status?! This nested If statement allows us to check for the values within the “status” column and set a colour based upon it. If the “status” is null, then the indicator will be black.

If(ThisItem.showAs = "free", RGBA(0,128,128,1), If(ThisItem.showAs = "busy", RGBA(230,0,0,1), If(ThisItem.showAs = "oof", RGBA(102,51,153,1), If(ThisItem.showAs = "tentative", RGBA(255,192,0,1), If(ThisItem.showAs = "workingElsewhere", Gray, Black)))))
A screenshot of the new visual indicator for Outlook meeting status next to the time indicator.

Add the final touches.

From here it’s entirely up to you how you style your calendar view. Personally, I would like to format the main body of the row and add the description, and then make a few changes to the styling of the Gallery. If you want to use any of the other available data from this action, just ensure that you add that specific column in your ShowColumns formula within the ClearCollect statement in your OnStart.

To finalise the solution, I then carried out a series of visual changes with very little code:

  • Removed the chevron.
  • Removed the original “showAs” label.
  • Replaced the “end” label with “description” by changing ‘ThisItem.end’ to ‘ThisItem.subject’.
  • Shrunk the height of each row in the gallery.
  • Adjusted the alignment of each component.
  • Changed the colour of the separator.
  • Renamed the controls that hadn’t already been modified earlier.
  • Adjusted the size of the logo and count of meetings.
A screenshot of the finished calendar view within the Canvas App after adding some finishing touches.

And there we have it! In this example we have just explored building a calendar, but think about the important information you evaluate to prioritise, and you could further expand upon this to include Planner, To Do, and many more pieces of data!

Bonus Points

I had a request from someone within the community to help them write some Power Fx code to show the logged in user’s calendar instead of your own, which is a great scenario and would expand the capability of your application significantly – going from being a personal productivity hub to a dashboard that others can also use.

My good friend & colleague Emilie makes this look easy, by setting the logged in user’s Calendar ID as a Variable which then replaces my code placeholder with the newly initialised Variable.

To do this, you simply need to add the Set function to your code above the existing ClearCollect statement for your calendar with the following code. This is what your OnStart Property should look like once you’re finished:

Set(
    calID,
    LookUp(
        Office365Outlook.CalendarGetTablesV2().value,
        name = "Calendar"
    ).id
);

ClearCollect(
    MyMeetings,
    SortByColumns(
        ShowColumns(
            Office365Outlook.GetEventsCalendarViewV3(
                calID,
                Text(
                    DateTimeValue(Today()),
                    DateTimeFormat.LongDateTime
                ),
                Text(
                    DateTimeValue(
                        DateAdd(
                            Today(),
                            1350,
                            TimeUnit.Minutes
                        )
                    ),
                    DateTimeFormat.LongDateTime
                )
            ).value,
            "start",
            "end",
            "showAs",
            "isAllDay",
            "subject"
        ),
        "start",
        SortOrder.Ascending
    )
);