Blog - Recent Posts

Email - Complete guide to validating email addresses

This post provides a guide on how to validate email address, including how to validate single and multiple email addresses, and how to accept or to reject email addresses based on email domain.

Themeing - How to apply consistant styles and themes to canvas apps with the CoE theming solution

Within organisations, it's usually necessary to build apps that comply with corporate branding styles. A common requirement is to build apps that share the same colours, font styles, and overall look and feel. To help with this requirement, the CoE starter kit provides a theming solution and this post introduces how this works.

Portal Apps - How to edit the source of a Portal App with Visual Studio Code - a quick guide

This post takes a first look at an exciting new feature for Power App Portal developers - the ability to download the source code for a portal app and to edit the HTML content outside of the online editor. This post provides an overview of how to get started with this new feature.

Excel - Vote to add numeric column support to the 'Excel Online Business Connector' connector!

The Excel Online Business connector does not correctly support number / numeric columns. This post describes this behaviour in more detail, and provides a link where you can vote to fix this limitation.

Functions - Here's a use of the @ operator you may have been unaware of

Did you know that you can use the @ operator to validate the schema of a record? If not, this post describes this usage in more detail.

Top 3 highlights of upcoming enhancements to the Power Apps language (Power FX)

Yesterday's Build conference introduced several exciting new enhancements to the Power Apps language.This post summarises the top 3 highlights.

Dataverse - How to switch to the classic designer when the option is not available

If a Power Platform update breaks features in the Dataverse designer (such as the table or view designers), and the option to open the classic designer is missing, it may be possible to carry on working by accessing the classic designer directly by web address.

Excel - All you need to know about the 'Excel Online Business' connector

The traditional way of connecting to an Excel data source through the OneDrive connector imposes serious limitations on the number of records we can retrieve. We can overcome several of these with the Excel Online Business connector, but it introduces a different set of problems. This post introduces the 'Excel for Business' connector, and describes what you need to know.

How Power App builders can more easily connect to code that has been written by pro-developers

Coming soon will be the release of the 'Visual Studio Extensions for Power Platform' - a feature that will allow app builders to more easily integrate features that are built by pro-developers. This post takes a first look at this feature.

Forms - How to convert a display form to an edit form

If you want to convert a display form to an edit form, there's unfortunately no way to do this through the app designer. However, we can accomplish this through code and this post describes how to carry out this task in more detail.

SharePoint - How to fix the "skip to main content" error message on integrated forms, or to fix forms where records don't save

Why do I receive a "skip to main content" message when I attempt to save a record on a SharePoint integrated form? This post describes this problem that app builders sometimes encounter.

How to detect the end-user web browser from within canvas app

There's no direct way to retrieve the session ID from within a running Power App. A workaround to this issue is to retrieve the session ID by calling a Flow. This post walks through how to implement this technique.

Android - Here's how to correctly configure the back button to navigate to the previous screen

There are two settings to set when we want to configure the back button on an Android device to navigate the user to the previous screen, rather than quit the running app. Which is the correct setting? In this post, we'll find out.

SharePoint - Use this trick to perform a 'contains' type search in a more delegable way

With SharePoint, it's difficult to perform a 'contains' type search that returns all matching records where the search term appears anywhere within a field, due to the fact that the search function is not delegable. A possible hack is to perform the search through a look up column. This enables us to carry out a delegable 'contains' type search against lists of up to 5,000 records. This post describes this technique in more detail.

SharePoint - Choice function now includes search capability

If you've been using Power Apps for some time, you'll be familiar with the Choices function - the function that retrieves lookup items from a SharePoint or Dataverse datasource. Following an update to Power Apps, this function now offers the built-in ability to filter the results. This post looks at how this applies to a SharePoint data source.