Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Thank you for your time!

Dear Everyone:

* I have a list with a file attachment in a SharePoint

* In Power Apps, I have an email Icon and when it is clicked on, it will send an email with the attachment..

* I don't want people able to send it outside the company, so I want to use the Office365Users connection to select my "send to" people (Power Apps has a great template of this)

* Also, I don't want to take up the real estate in my Power App screen to filter my company email addresses.

* When you initiate the flow, can Power Automate prompt up a small box with the company email addresses?

* I'm thinking the only way around this may be using "visible=false" to hide my background screen or containers, then use "visible=true" for another box to pop up (a container perhaps) where the user can select an email address then pass it over to Power Automate.

But it would be cool if Power Automate could do this instead.

I would have to alter this statement

Categories:

Building flows

Hi,

A flow that you trigger from Power Apps cannot itself pop up a dialog box inside the app to ask for an email address; that UI has to be built in Power Apps and the chosen email passed into the flow.

Your probable approach of using a hidden container/modal pattern is correct.

Why Power Automate can’t show a popup in your app
Power Automate flows run server‑side and have no ability to render UI elements directly in a Power Apps canvas app screen.
Even when you use “Manually trigger a flow” and define inputs, those prompts appear only in the Power Automate run experience (or mobile app), not as a popup overlay in your canvas app UI.

Because of that, the usual pattern is:

Power Apps handles all user interaction (popups, pickers, validation).
Power Automate receives whatever values the app has collected as parameters and then sends emails, talks to SharePoint, etc.

Recommended pattern: popup in Power Apps, then call the flow
Canvas apps don’t have a built‑in “modal dialog” control, but the standard approach is to build one using containers and a Boolean variable to control the Visible property.

Typical approach (matches what you described):

Add a full‑screen container as a gray overlay (Fill like RGBA(0,0,0,0.4)) and set Visible = showEmailPopup.
Inside it, add another centered container acting as the dialog box; place a ComboBox/Text input + OK/Cancel buttons in there.
On your email icon’s OnSelect, set UpdateContext({ showEmailPopup: true }) so the popup appears.
On the popup’s OK button, call your flow and pass the selected email:
SendEmailFlow.Run( EmailComboBox.Selected.Mail, ThisItem.ID, … ).
Then set showEmailPopup back to false to hide the dialog.

This keeps your main screen clear (the popup is only visible when needed) and gives you exactly the “little box” you want, but controlled entirely by Power Apps.

Hope this helps.

Thanks!

Inogic