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Can't place gallery inside of Form control

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Posted on by kacmcgrath

Hi there,

I am trying to create a form is based on a few different Sharepoint Lists. There are lists that I want to pull values from for drop downs (for example, a list with department units will populate a drop down that a user can use to select a unit) AND I also want to pull from lists to populate galleries. For example, I have a SP List called "Tasks" that lists a bunch of (you guessed it) tasks and their associated unit. The selection in the Unit drop down will be used to filter the tasks that are displayed in the gallery. The gallery will also contain form controls to rate a person's performance on each task. All of this data should be submittable to another SharePoint List, which will then be used to create data dashboards of employee performance, etc.

I created all of this in a Canvas App but didn't use a Form control. Of course, when I went to set up a submit button there was no form name to reference, so I started trying to rebuild this with the form as the foundation. The problem I am having with this is I can't seem to put a gallery inside of a form control. I've tried doing this with a blank canvas app, and I've tried generating the app from the list and trying to add a gallery to that. No matter what I do, the gallery is created outside of the form. I am attaching a screenshot of the app that I was working on so you can see what I'm trying to accomplish. It's a two column layout with a gallery on either side pulling two different sets of tasks based on the drop down.

I'm looking to either find some workaround that doesn't require me to have these elements inside a form control, OR, to understand how I can get them inside a form control. Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to look at this. Please let me know if I can provide any additional context.

Screen Shot 2021-08-27 at 11.48.21 AM.png

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RandyHayes 76,297 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@kacmcgrath

You can place a Gallery in a Form DataCard by inserting a Gallery, then selecting the Gallery and cutting it (ctrl-x) and then selecting your datacard and pasting (ctrl-v).

However, be cautious of galleries in forms...they do not behave well depending on what you are trying to do.

You are best to have the gallery outside of the form.

I hope this is helpful for you.

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kacmcgrath 20 on at

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@RandyHayes thanks for your reply. It sounds like you are saying that it just may not work reliably to have a gallery containing for controls inside of a form. Is that correct?

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RandyHayes 76,297 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@kacmcgrath

It really depends on how you use it in the form. If you are going to rely on the AllItems property of the gallery or any controls therein (based on the AllItems), then it will not work properly.

But it all really depends on your intentions with it.

It is much easier to just place it outside of the Form and have it work alongside of the Form.

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kacmcgrath 20 on at

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Sorry, I'm fairly new with this platform. I'm not clear whether you are suggesting there actually is some way for the gallery to be outside the form and still submit data to a list through form controls in the gallery or if you are just saying it's easier in general to place a gallery outside of a form. If it can't do the former then it's sort of a nonstarter for me because I would be relying on form controls inside the gallery (which i'm assuming relies on the AllItems property of the gallery). Thanks again for your time and responses.

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kacmcgrath 20 on at

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To be more specific, if there is some other way (outside of using galleries) to dynamically display fields by filtering a list inside of a form then I have no clue what that would be. Any hints appreciated.

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RandyHayes 76,297 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@kacmcgrath

Yes, your form can get its values from any control you want. You don't have to have anything inside the form. In fact, I use forms for just about everything (because they bring so much to the table that you will not have to do yourself), but I rarely use the interface of the form....it gets its values from anywhere else that I want.

You might find my comprehensive video on Forms - everything you ever wanted to know, plus a few things you never thought possible to be of interest as you're starting out.

It's a very long video, so don't let that scare you as it is broken into sections and there is a table of contents in the description so that you can quickly get to information that you want.

Of particular interest once you've grasped the basics, is in Part 3 where I show how to separate the form and the interface.

So a couple of things about Forms. When you SubmitForm, it is quite simple...it uses the Update properties of all of the datacards in the form to create the record that it will submit. In general (by default) the Update property of a datacard is set to get the value of the input control that is in the datacard to use as the field value submitted...but there is NOTHING that stops you from getting that value from any other control in the entire app.

SO...as a basic example, let's say you had a list of selections in a Gallery (from a Value column of some data - hand written or from a datasource) and the goal was to have a checkbox in each row of the gallery so the user can check the items they want. This will all need to be then put into a comma separated text column in your datasource. SO...we change the Update property of the datacard for that text column in your form to the following : Concat(Filter(theGallery.AllItems, theCheckBox.Value), Value & ",")

Now, when SubmitForm is done, the value for that column is coming from a control outside of the gallery.

Perhaps the above gives you some ideas on where you're heading. But, always happy to provide more detail as you go.

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AL-15081948-0 34 on at

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Hi Randy,

I have a use case where I would like to use the AllItems property from my nested gallery inside a form. Is there a workout to accomplish this, or am I out of luck? My form is very long and nesting the gallery inside of the form was the only way I could seem to get everything to scroll at one together. I posted the code below I am trying to use. It works perfectly when outside of the form but doesn't save any of the values in a collection when the gallery is nested inside of the edit form. Let me know!

ForAll( descGal.AllItems, Collect(descFinal,{Description: d.Text, Price: p.Text, Cost: c.Text, WorkHours: wh.Text })); GroupBy(descFinal, "Description", "Price", "Cost", "WorkHours");
@RandyHayes

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