Combo Box items not visible (text not showing)

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Posted on by Daniel_Pa

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I'm new to Power Apps and I have an issue regarding showing items in Combo Boxes.

I'm currently building a price lookup app, and everything seems to be working fine, except i can't see items in my Combo Boxes.

The items are there, and when selected they work fine with filtering my Gallery - i just can't see the text. It's as if the text is invisible.

Although I'm also unable to search in the Combo Box.

See attached screenshot.

Any advise? I feel like i have tried everything - but at the same time don't really know where to look.

I'm using PowerApps for Teams btw. if that makes any difference.

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Brammers 46 on at

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Check the settings for the ComboBox. It's likely that you just need to set the DisplayFields and SearchFields values correctly.

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Daniel_Pa 244 on at

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I'm afraid that these options are not available in PowerApps for Teams - the possibilities seem rather narrow.
See attached screenshot for available settings.

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Brammers 46 on at

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Same on my version - and caused me a headache when I started using PowerApps too.

You can find the values in the Advanced section (over on the right hand side on 'normal' Powerapps), or when you click the 'Fields' part where you select which Fields to show in the ComboBox.

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Daniel_Pa 244 on at

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This seems to lead to something correct. When selecting an option in Views, I'm able to select the correct column in the Fields. But now I'm unsure how to get only distinct values that aren't empty.

Could you help point me i the direction, where to add Distinct in the new formula?
Filter(Prices2; 'Prices2 (Visninger)'.'Prices2 Advanced Find View')

And maybe also understand the different Views? I've attached a screenshot of the available options.

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Brammers 46 on at

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Empty values shouldn't appear anyway, and you should be able to wrap the whole Filter statement inside a Distinct statement like so -

Distinct(Filter(DataSource, FormulaToFilterWith),'ColumnToBaseDistinctValuesOn').Result

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Daniel_Pa 244 on at

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This is still causing me some issues. I feel that I understand the Distinct-command, but still something is not working when adding it.
I've attached two screenshots - one with Distinct and one without it.
With it enabled, the text disappears, but the options still remain. (I've removed some text from the non-Distinct image, for privacy reasons)

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Daniel_Pa 244 on at

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It seems that PowerApps for Teams isn't happy about "Distinct" - at least with the amount of data I have. I ended up creating separate tables with my distinct values, to use in the combobox.

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Mo.jo.jo 77 on at

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@Daniel_Pa
Thanks for sharing the workaround. I have a very small table, about 8 rows, and 3 months on Distinct still seems to cause the values from the table to be not visible. Out of interest how did your application work out in the end?
I am quite new to Power Apps but I have found so many issues with Power Apps for Teams, functions that don't work the same as on the main Power Apps, simple string arrays that only display as text etc that I am increasingly not confident/comfortable that Power Apps in Teams should be used for any sort of production based efforts. It seems part-baked to me.

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Daniel_Pa 244 on at

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Hi mojojo

I ended up redoing the entire app in the Power Apps browser suite. I had a few hiccups that I simply couldn't figure out if were errors made by me (it ended up being rather complex) or actual shortcomings of Power Apps for Teams. Thus i decided a remake was in order - which ended up solving all the issues.

To accommodate the large dataset I created a collection where I filter the dataset alphabetically and then apply distinct on the individual letters:

This worked since I knew there were few results for each letter (in most cases just a single), but these would appear several hundred times each.

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Mo.jo.jo 77 on at

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@Daniel_Pa Thanks for the response.
Using the Distinct will be central to the app I would like to build. So if the function does not work with the combo box then Power Apps for Teams is of no use. It seems so odd that something so central does not work.
Plus I have found other "simple" bugs e.g. string arrays that display as numbers within the combo box that fill me with little confidence that I won't find larger issues as I go further down the line.
So it seems best to avoid Power Apps for Teams as the tool I start building my first production app attempt with.

Thanks for sharing the workaround for the large dataset. I think I get it. Neat thinking 🙂

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