Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi Most Awesome Power Apps Community,

I have been trying to solve a business pain point using Power Apps for about a week now and I'm struggling with creating the data model that both meets normalisation best practices and works in Power Apps/BI.

First, some background. We have hundreds of contractors, each contractor has a number of skills (e.g. printers, photocopiers, plotters etc ~5) and for each of those skills supported brands (Canon, HP, Brother, etc ~15). A contractor could have one or many skills and one or many brands.

Currently this information is in a giant spreadsheet and users manually look it up. It's a small problem but I thought a great way to get started with the Power Platform and demonstrate its capabilities.

The Power App is really just a front end so our users can add, edit, delete contractors. I have built a search dashboard within Power BI so that our team can quickly find a contractor based on their skills or location (refer screen shot attached). In future I plan to add a search function similar to a retail store website look up function where our user will enter the clients address, skill/brand required and Power BI or App will return a list of suitable contractors in order of closest to furthers. However, thats the future for now I would be happy to just get my dashboard working with manual filters.

I have the following custom entities

PFP-Companies - stores company info (company name, phone, website etc)
PFP-Addresses - stores company address (some companies have multiple locations)
PFP-Contacts - stores contact info (name, phone, email, location)
PFP-Skills - stores list of skills (printers, photocopiers, plotters etc ~5)
PFP-Brands - stores list of brands (Canon, HP, Brother, etc ~15)
PFP-ContactsSkills - stores the skills and brands supported by each contact (ContactName, Skill, Brand)

This model is complies with traditional normalisation rules and allows me to filter in Power BI by location (state), brand or skill because they are each stored in a single column. However, I can't for the life of me figure out how to build a form in Power Apps and submit all the brand/skill records in one submission.

The default Power Apps new form based on our PFP-ContactsSkills table works but requires our users to add a skill/brand pair for every skill/brand which gets quite time consuming and I can't figure out for the life of me how you build a form to edit them or prevent users from adding multiple identical skill/brand pairs.

Ideally we want a form where the users can select the company, contact and skill and then multi select the brands (screenshot attached). Ultimately we want the user experience to be positive for our first demonstration of the Power Platform and open to suggestions on the UI 😉

It seems Power Apps wants a table with a column for each category. This wastes database storage space as your storing a yes/no value for every brand where the model above only stores the brands that are relevant to that contact. It also means adding a new category requires creating a new column which will mean rebuilding the UI and Power BI reports each time. My biggest problem, however, is as the brands are represented as columns the only way in Power BI to filter that information will be to add a slicer for every column which is cumbersome and requires editing the report each time a new brand is added.

I am definitely a beginner at both Power Apps and Power BI and hoping someone can point me in the right direction? Open to changing the Power App or Power BI report I just don't know what I don't know.

Thanking you in advance.....

Cheers,

Chiper