Thanks for this video, i have 4 years experience with power apps and it is so. Also you depend on the power apps support team and you have to pay for support
That is shocking that you can only do a join across two records. And the lack of SQL querying/updating is going to make the support of systems built in this an absolute nightmare if the data model is in any way complex (and frankly even if it isn't that complex).
Hi Paul! Just got a nasty nested gallery to work using this video, FIVE years later! You are such a lifesaver, thank you so much! +1 subscriber for you good sir!
The account and contact addresses are actually stored in the address table. if you look in the address table you will see the addresses for the customer. It's a convenience to show the first two addresses on a table form. there is an address sequence field in address, and the first two addresses show up on the account or contact record.
Hey Paul. I found this very useful. However, it is kind of dated. I wonder if you have or could update it using the most recent tools - PowerAutomate, Sharepoint, and PowerApps
the formula that you copied didn't work form me, can you look at it please? I think the problem is in Selectedcre_17_name but I don't know why is it not working. (orderHeaderID column is cre17_name for me) If(CountRows(Filter(Selectedcre17_name, cre17_name = Selectedcre17_name)) = 0 ,Collect(Selectedcre17_name{cre17_name: Selectedcre17_name}) ,Remove(Selectedcre17_name, Filter(Selectedcre17_name, cre17_name = Selectedcre17_name)))
Paul, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. I've be doing extensive research on a tool that will fill the needs for our small company to replace a MS Access database and numerous Excel spreadsheets containing data and reports that have been created as our company has been growing. Immediately after watching your video, it had me second guessing my choice on Dataverse. Thanks for scaring the hell out of me that I chose the wrong product for my company! ;). I continued to do much more research. There are not a whole lot of people on RU-vid that deeply understand the Dataverse product, not to mention the other Microsoft tools, that cannot be overlooked. We cannot take just one product in isolation in the current state of software and data management. Smaller, more nimble programs are being created to handle data online. (In the cloud for the new terminology). On that note, have you looked into Microsoft's Power Bi and the depth of querying and visualizations of this tool. It is also intended to be a presentation tool that is meant to be put into apps, like Dataverse, as dashboards, etc., for the specific situations that you are stating limits Dataverse. I believe Dataverse fully supports data normalization. I agree some of the standard tables are not set up to most effectively control this, but setting up your own tables with one-to-many relationships, as well as creating your own tables for many-to-many relationships is the correct way to go. I also agree that it looks as if you cannot easily access the self created many-to-many tables that are created behind the scenes when using lookups that cause a many-to-many relationship directly; hence the reason you create the many-to-many tables yourself and stick to only using the one to many fields in all other tables, views and forms. Honestly, why would people be looking up which products they've sold in a particular city, using a "data input system"? That is a data reporting system, such as Power Bi, which uses Power Query to dive deep into the relationship paths. You may be thinking, which is understandable, that "views" should be the same as queries in database products, but they are not. (Future improvement? Maybe some, but I doubt it, as I will state in business decisions below) Please keep in mind, this is not what we OG programmers are used to with a database....but Dataverse is not a database as we've always known it, with powerful querying features, like SQL and most other databases. Microsoft makes a lot of effort to not present it as a database. My opinion is that Dataverse is a very nice data input system and is easy to create and use, with very little coding knowledge required. It is a database from the view that it does, in fact, securely store your data and can definitely ensure data normalization, but it just doesn't have the powerful querying options we are used to in a database. Why did Microsoft leave the powerful querying tool out of Dataverse, that is usually in a database, as we've always known it? I believe for two reasons. One-a business model to sell additional querying and reporting tools seperately. Two- to be able to have a team dedicated to advancing a tool, like Power Bi, to handle all kinds of data sources and put the focus on it's ability to do some, ever improving, data manipulation and visualizations, without bloating the actual data input side of the business processes. Good business, genius, or evil genius, you decide. :) Thanks again for scaring me, but I have worked through that and am confident Dataverse, and the suite of Microsoft products, is the way to go for our small company as we continue to grow for a long time. Hope this helps!
Thanks for response. I have been involved in a few projects that use Power Bi and it seems like a good product for interactive dashboards - though I think less well suited to paginated reports for which you might want to look elsewhere. Power Bi is capable of pulling in data from various sources into its own data model - so if some of your data is still in Excel you should still be able to pull that into Power Bi and mix it with Dataverse or whatever. Of course, licensing is complex and can be expensive, so good to talk to someone who understands that side of things and explain your requirements so they can advise you of the likely costs. I suspect the reasons for the data manipulation limitations of Dataverse are twofold - first, it is not new, it is built on Dynamics (and its predecessors) and as far as I am aware was not designed to support the features of a traditional relational database. Secondly it is a software-as-a-service offering. The greater the querying capabilities it has, and the more people use them, the more processing, disk io, etc. it is going to use, and the more capacity MS need to provide in their servers to ensure users get an acceptable experience. Great that Dataverse is a good match for your requirements; my experience building apps against Dataverse has been that there is much work required to overcome the querying limitations which has resulted in unnecessarily complex designs and technical debt making maintenance more difficult, but all projects have different requirements and perhaps I have just been unlucky that those I have worked on push past the boundaries of Dataverse.
Absolutely appreciated! I started back in the early 90's "developing" in MS-Access, writing Macros and VBA against data stored in MS-Access (IMHO a much better starting point for data Devs as Sharepoint or Dataverse could ever be), then converting to VB5/6 and SQL-Server (and Oracle as well), later switched to .NET. About 10 years ago I joined "the dark side" and dropped development, focussing on mass-data related operations. Recently I stumbled across PA and did some work with that. First Impression was great, no question. But as soon as one dives deeper into that, I got the feeling of "eye candy". Looks sweet on first sight, but the more you work with it, the more you miss control of things. Recently I struggled with the "explicit column selection" stuff. Cost me nearly 2 days to figure out, what goes on there. A "feature" to cope with the "SELECT * FROM" guys to prohibit PA-Apps to slow down. Don't get me wrong, there is a place for PA, but there are bounderies as well and those should be known! Therefore: Thanks for this vid!
Thanks in a million. Great content. Awesome. Very well explained. I couldn't find this explanation--simply put anywhere else. Great teachers are hard to find. Grade: A++💥
Hi, loved the video on how to make galleries in another gallery. How do I proceed if I want to open the selected form from my sub gallery?? I've tried subgallery.selected. it doesn't work
Glad to see this. I learned data modelling back in the early nineties and I've always put that knowledge into any database I've created. It ensures that your data is right and also provides the flexibility at the database design level to achieve anything you want to. I'm brand new to Davaverse and I still have loads of unanswered questions. My thoughts are that Microsoft has produced this interface in order to reduce a lot of the work involved when building the data model e.g. lookup table in many to many relationships. My employer is one of the largest broadband providers in the UK and they are encouraging everyone to develop their own apps for local use at a department level. We've historically used Sharepoint lists and, for most applications, they are OK but with the Power platform being encouraged, I can see Dataverse becoming used more and more, particularly with it being available to anyone with a Teams account. For most of these "little" apps with only a few tables, the data-modelling problems may not be too problematic. For very large development projects however, Iit is vital to get it right from the start In the example you gave where an account table that is related to a line items table, wouldn't the account primary key be a foreign key in the line items table so it would be part of the child record? Perhaps I've misunderstood what you were saying. I look forward to any future videos you post in relation to Dataverse.
I know the video is 4 years old and I will be honest I haven't watched the whole thing yet. But my question is, will this work with subforms as well. I will now watch the video because my number 1 complaint regarding Microsoft and it's red headed child named Access is the fact it doesn't auto scale the whole form - or allow it to happen easily.
Hi Jeff. Yes, this can deal with subforms. You need to have Access set to show forms in windows rather than tabs (the resizing events don't seem fire the same way in tabs). If you can live with that restriction, this solution will allow you to scale subforms as well as other controls.
@@pauloflaherty6757 it still works in galleries but it only display the first record as it is the behaviour of the lookup function it would have been great if it could work with the filter function..
I've largely moved away from Power Apps now. The more experience I have had of trying to support apps that have been 'out in the world' for years, the more disillusioned I have become. Changes to the platform and mobile players are still breaking production apps on occasions and changes to studio sometimes break apps when they are republished (even if the edit is very minor) - this is not all the time, but often enough that I have lost confidence in Power Apps for important tasks. When I consider how much time I have spent trying to debug issues I feel that it would likely have been more cost efficient in the long term to build the apps using tools with better support debugging, logging, co-development and source-code control. I think Power Apps is good/quick for a proof-of-concept but ones the concept has shown its worth, it is better to develop on a more robust platform/toolset in the medium to long term.
Great analysis.. My only quibble is that power platform is the underlying platform for Dynamics apps, millions of users and business critical also, eg crm. Major revenue driver for ms, and it will not be discarded.
Your feedback stood the test of time. Still valid today despite 50% discount on licensing. You could have added that it comes with E5 subscription as well.
This is the BEST power apps video I’ve come across so far, thank you so much. Please don’t apologise for times where you have to go back and fix something, those are the most helpful to newbies like myself. Great video please keep them coming :)
Hi Paul! It's been a year since this video and I would love to connect with you to see if there has been any evolution of these thoughts, and/or if we can chat and document feedback. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn if possible. Thank you again for your transparency.
I creeated an app in tablet layout and the parent gallery remains statc height. Using the exact same values for a mobile layout, it works exactly as expected; both parent and child gallleries resize. I noticed you use a mobile layout as well: does it only work in that mode?
Just a question regarding this. Our company have a whole lot of workers that dont work in an office. So dont have microsoft accounts. Does this solution mean everyone using it must have an office 365 account/subscription?
I made a form resizer once by making a small form with only a Microsoft Slider control and the necessary VBA code for it, then putting it on any form as a subform. The slider control would simply adjust the dimensions of the parent form (with the Parent object) and all its controls -- height, width, top, left, font size, columnwidth, rowheight, etc. with the proper percentage that corresponds to the slider's value. No class module was needed, only simple adjustments of those properties in the code. All the code would simply be in that subform with the slider, with no changes whatsoever to any other forms or controls or modules. This method would create a "recyclable" component that you can simply place on any form with no extra coding required. Mr. O'Flaherty's method is great, but if you don't need the ability to actually drag the corners of a form to resize it, then using a slider control in the manner I described above would save a lot of work. Also, if your form's border is not sizable (sometimes this is necessary), Mr. O'Flaherty's method doesn't work.
As I hear this I would then say that someone should NEVER use Power Apps for anything production... Yes, real apps are difficult to get going but the number and serverity of the the negatives are just way way to high
Very informative and cautionary, Thanks! What's your take on low code app builder such as retool or appsmith? Are they good alternative to escape these horrors?
Hi Paul. Great video, Thank you. May I ask... I'm getting an error when i create the button to run the flow. I followed your istructions but I'm getting an error. The button on select statetment is: OCRBusinessCards.Run(First(colphotos).Url).textocr but I'm getting "Invalid number of arguments. received 1 expected 20. Can you please help? Thank you in advance for your prompt reply. Michael
This is awesome. In my app I am displaying the users' photo from Office365Users.User Photo for items where a true contact exists in my SP list column and if there is no person assigned it uses a generic photo. But when I apply sorting to the gallery (in the items property), the first image that loads will be displayed for other items that have no contact and no image. Any idea why the first image would be duplicated down the gallery?
