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For All Ordering

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Posted on by Arrow3009

Hi,

Is there any way to order/sort a For All operation? In the use case, I need to apply a row number to each row in a collection, sorted alphabetically by one of the values.

Kind Regards,

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Power Apps component framework

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Arrow3009 30 on at

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For All Ordering

@Pstork1 Thanks for the advice below, i'll have a look at using a Flow to achieve this.

@ronaldwalcott Thanks for this workaround, this looks like a good solution to achieve this within Power Apps. I'll give this a go.

Kind Regards,
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Pstork1 64,996 on at

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For All Ordering

The easiest way would be to use a Power Automate flow to do the ordering and then send back the resulting collection. Flow loops have an option to run concurrently in parallel, but that isn't the standard. So using a flow you can do a true loop.
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ronaldwalcott 1,501 on at

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For All Ordering

You can simulate one. Here is an example from my notes that I responded to on a similar type of question. The approach would be the same. The objective was to renumber the column PriorityRank

Hopefully it helps.

Add a Sequence Column to a Sorted Table
Depending on your answer you could do something like create a sorted collection with the ID and priority rank (this column is only needed for testing)
SortByColumns(table, PriorityRank)
You would then need to add a new PriorityRank column which would need to be the incremented value
AddColumn(SortByColumns(table, PriorityRank), newPriorityRank, 0)

To do this you use something like

ClearCollect(
  SortedIndexedPriority,
  ForAll(
  Sequence(CountRows(SortedPriority)),
  With(
  {
Index: Value,
Item: Last(
  FirstN(SortedPriority, Value)
  )
  },
  {
ItemField1: Item.Name,
NewPriorityRank: Index*10,
ID: Item.ID,
PriorityRank: Item.PriorityRank
  }
  )
  )
);

You would then use this collection to update the original records
Arrow3009 30 on at

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For All Ordering

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply, that makes sense considering it isn't a true loop.

Do you know of any workaround whereby we could effectively loop through a collection to achieve this?
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Pstork1 64,996 on at

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For All Ordering

If you read the documentation you will find that the ForAll() isn't a true loop. It applies whatever formula you supply to all the records simultaneously. It will often look like its doing things in order if processing the formula takes the same amount of time for each item. But that is just an illusion. There is no order to the way the formula is applied and no way to force one.

See the documentation here: ForAll function - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
"When writing your formula, keep in mind that records can be processed in any order and, when possible, in parallel. The first record of the table may be processed after the last record."

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Paul Papanek Stork, MVP
Blog: https://www.dontpapanic.com/blog