Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

New to Powerapps and just looking for guidance on where to start. We currently have a process where a department fills out a PDF and then signs and emails it to another group. If we have a question about any of the info that is on that PDF, we have to go through each PDF to find that information.

I would like to use Powerapps to fill that form in and then have that data saved into a on-prem sql database. I think I know this part is possilbe. The second part is, after completing the form, is there a way to create a process to save as a PDF to a specific folder and then email it to a user?

Categories:

Building Power Apps

georgemaka,

We have a preview PDF control that lets you use OnSelect and OnStateChange:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/controls/control-pdf-viewer

I'm not sure if this will be a fit for data entry, though; for one, the PDF can't require authentication. Might help in terms of gathering specific info, though.

You could take an approach like the one outlined here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/dataverse/upload-download-file

The app could trigger a Flow that interacts with the on-prem SQL instance and creates PDFs from dynamic input. This obviously uses the Dataverse as the example data source but the logic would be pretty swappable.

Using a form to save to a data source is definitely Power Apps friendly:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/working-with-data-sources

You should be able to use the PDF viewer to get info, pump that into a more typical form/screen and then use that to write to a data source. Hopefully this is a start at least.

Let us know!

Patrick