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Responsive Containers

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Posted on by Commander_Data

Apologies for the slightly long explanation below...

It's appears many are promoting the use of responsive containers, horizontal and vertical. We however have had issues with height and width calculation on more complex components within these responsive containers. This seems to be exacerbated by having some elements within the responsive containers with the Visibility property programmatically set. We hide some controls (form fields, labels, etc.) by data, user or user role. The Studio designer when zoomed to about 40%, showed some of these controls appearing way off screen even when the container itself was displayed in the correct position and the X, Y, Width and Height appearing to be set correctly.

Intermittently the controls will appear, often after a screen recycle, switching away then back again. We found very intermittent in play mode in LIVE, some users experiencing the issue and others with the same data fine. If Visible was false, the dimension properties were also intermittently displaying incorrectly. If onscreen form, or data was amended by the user, controls would not recalculate correctly, or only partially, even more confusing. Even changing button text based on variables, or App.Formula, would corrupt the display.
It's difficult to prove this is an issue in PowerApps, although I did replace some responsive containers with a standard container, then reprogrammed the X, Y, Width and Height properties of the controls to place them dependant on each other manually. This then showed the width and position correctly. I was also able to reuse the visibility property as required for our purposes.

This has happened across multiple Apps. Unfortunately I'm unlikely to be able to post any screen shots due to company restrictions. I am not in a position where I can spend time away from our next round of development to produce the simplest example but if I do would try and post here!

The idea of responsive containers would enable users with less development experience develop move complex layouts without the need to build the responsiveness manually. I may have to alter up to 4 Apps to remove the responsive controls if I cannot find another solution.
Has anyone else had these issues?

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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There are three kinds of Responsive Containers, Horizontal, Vertical, and Containers. Horizontal and Vertical containers are designed to stack components inside them Horizontally or Vertically and resize things on the fly. Having some of the components inside those containers be Invisible throws off those calculations. The way I normally use containers to avoid this is by using Horizontal and vertical containers to divide up the screen, but always using a plain container as the inmost container to actually hold the controls. This kind of design avoids the issues you are describing. If you follow that rule of thumb the use of containers becomes much more intuitive and much less of a problem.

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Commander_Data 67 on at

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This is the approach I am going to take. Using complex components with variable height, width, and trying to use them in the vertical and horizontal containers, just needs more work from MS to be usable as I would expect. Having said that for screen layout yes they seem to work as expected.
Thanks, just not me with the issue then.

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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As I said, complex components with variable height, width and placement ARE going to be a problem in Vertical and Horizontal containers because the container is the one that is responsible for placing the controls. If you want to use variable height, width, and placement that isn't handled by the container then you should be using a regular container not a Vertical or Horizontal one. Its not a matter of MS doing more work. The settings you are trying to impose on the controls is conflicting with the settings imposed by the container. That's what they are designed to do and it isn't going to change.

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