Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I'd like to create a print button in my app to be used across multiple screens. The printout itself is handled easily enough by writing to HTML and outputting via power automate. The part I am looking for insight with is passing variables into a component. I have it working exactly as I need it to, but there are some errors being thrown and I'm not sure why exactly. Apologies in advance for the long winded post.

First, I create a simple collection and record variable and use those within a Concatenate() and Concat() function to output a simple HTML table:

ClearCollect(
 ExampleCollection,
 Table(
 {
 item: "item1",
 value: "value1"
 },
 {
 item: "item2",
 value: "value2"
 },
 {
 item: "item3",
 value: "value3"
 }
 )
)

Set(ExampleVariable, {Title:"Table Title", Col1:"Item", Col2:"Value"})

Set(HTML,Concatenate(
"<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<thead>
 <tr><th colspan=2>"&ExampleVariable.Title&"</th></tr>
 <tr>
 <th>"&ExampleVariable.Col1&"</th><th>"&ExampleVariable.Col2&"</th>
 </tr>
</thead>
<tbody>",Concat(ExampleCollection,"<tr>
 <td>"&item&"</td>
 <td>"&value&"</td>
 </tr>"),"</tbody>

</table>

</body>
</html>"))

This works just as expected:

The issue with this is that my html is much more complex than the above and must be used across many screens, so I'd like to use a custom component to store and update the code in a single location. So, I create a component with a single button and the same OnSelect formula as the print button, which of course throws an error due to the variable:

If I add an input property (VariableIn as a Record) and an output property (VariableOut as a string), I can then add the component to a screen, set the VariableIn property to my ExampleVariable from earlier, and everything works again:

(I promise I'm getting to the point...)

The problem with THIS is that if I ever want to change the structure of my VariableIn property (for example, if I want to add a Col3 field), then it resets all of the inputs to default on each screen that I previously added the component to, which is a real pain (as I mentioned, there are a lot of input properties and a lot of screens):

SO, I wonder if I can simply set the default value within the component to my ExampleVariable so that I can simply change or add fields without ever touching the default value within the component. This throws an error:

BUT, it actually works perfectly! And, even with the error, intellisense recognizes the record fields from within the Component:

There are no errors within the actual button formula, only on the input property of the component itself. Beyond that, it works exactly as I need it to and I can add it to as many screens as I want without ever having to manually set the input. If I want to add a field to my ExampleVariable, I do have to clear out the component input default and paste it back in before it's recognized within the button formula, but that's literally just a single cut and paste and a whole lot easier than going through and resetting the input properties on every single screen of my app.

Finally, on to my actual questions...

1 - Is there a better way to acheive this result without any error messages?

2 - Beyond the fact that an error is shown, is there a risk or downside to doing this? Thus far, I haven't been able to find any undesired behavior, and that's with about 20 input properties of various types in my actual print component.

Categories:

Building Power Apps