Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

How to Handle Long Questions in Power Pages Multi-Step Forms

Hi everyone,

I'm currently building a job application form using Power Pages and integrating it with Dataverse. I've set up a multi-step form, but I've hit a limitation when it comes to asking longer questions. Specifically, the column headers for the tables (where responses are stored) seem to have a restricted number of characters, which is causing issues when my questions exceed this limit.

For example, I want to ask questions like "Have you previously worked or engaged with this company, if yes please provide information below?" or "In the past 7 years, have you been convicted of or pled guilty...," but the column header in Dataverse can't accommodate these longer strings. As a result, the questions appear truncated, making the form less user-friendly.

Since I don’t have any coding experience, I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on how I can handle this challenge. Specifically:

Is there a way to ask longer questions while saving answers to Dataverse tables without running into character limit issues?
Can I customize the question text in the form independently of the column names in Dataverse?
Are there best practices for handling this scenario?

Please share some resources. TIA

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General

Hi CU23072037-0,

Thank you for choosing Microsoft Power Platform Community.

Here are some suggestions to help you handle this scenario:

Use Shortened Column Names: You can use shorter column names in Dataverse and map them to longer question texts in your form. This way, the column headers won't be truncated, and you can still display the full question text to users.

Rich Text Editor Control: Consider using the Rich Text Editor control in Power Pages. This allows you to add rich text components to your form fields, which can help you display longer questions more effectively.

Custom Metadata: You can add custom metadata to your form fields to store the full question text. This metadata can be used to display the full question text to users while keeping the column headers short.

Best Practices: Follow best practices for enhancing UI/UX in Power Pages. This includes conducting thorough research on your users' needs, ensuring your content is clear and engaging, and using visual aesthetics to enhance the user experience.

For more detailed guidance, you can refer to the Power Pages guidance documentation and the tutorial on adding forms to your page.

I hope these suggestions help you create a more user-friendly job application form! If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.

Happy to help

Robu 1

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