How is Back function supposed to work?

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Posted on by Magra

How exactly is Back() function supposed to work?

Microsoft Docs says: "The Back function returns to the screen that was most recently displayed."

However I now created an app with a couple of screens where the behaviour seems to be slightly different.

If I navigate from Screen1 to Screen2 to Screen3 and use the Back function there, it takes me to Screen2 as expected.

If I use the back function again on Screen 2, I would expect PowerApps to take me to Screen3 (= the screen that was most recently displayed). But it takes me to Screen1 instead.

Is the description on MS Docs incomplete/wrong or did I miss something?

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Building Power Apps

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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What you are seeing is the expected behavior. As you navigate through screens they are added to a stack. The Back button takes you to the screen that was the next on the stack. So if you navigate back from Screen3 to Screen2 that removes Screen 3 from the stack. So doing back again will take you back to Screen 1. Basically navigating back will forget that you were on Screen 3, so its no longer the most recent.

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Magra on at

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Oddly this Post from a MS guy says exactly the contrary:
https://www.techmikael.com/2019/03/a-simple-solutions-to-implementing.html

"The caveat with Back is that it doesn’t build a navigation history, but remember the previous screen only. This means that if you go from screen 5 to 4 using Back, then the next Back call will take you to 5 again, not screen 3."

Of course that may have been changed since 2019.

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Back will take you to the screen that you Navigated from. If you got to the screen by using back it doesn't count that as navigation. Navigate builds the stack. Back just removes things from the stack. In this case I think Mikael is wrong, which doesn't happen very often. Back basically uses the same functionality as Back in your browser. If you go back in your browser it doesn't add the website you are backing from to the path. Hitting back again will take you to the previous web site in your history, not the one you backed out of. Power Apps is the same

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PDRinoG 40 on at

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Hi,
How to check if a user already navigated between screens? In the documentation I found this: "Back normally returns true but returns false if the user hasn't navigated to another screen since starting the app." I'm currently not able to get this working.
I have created an app, that can be started from a link in a Teams chat message. The app will open a variable screen and shows immediately all details of an item from the message. But at that time the user didn't navigate between screens and Back() will not work. I would like to hide the button or I would like to navigate the user to the home screen when Back() is false.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/functions/function-navigate

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Magra on at

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Hi PDRinoG

I would do that with a boolean variable. Set it to false by default respectively on application start, and to true once user clicks one of the navigation buttons. Then set the visible property of the back Button to that variable.

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SKowalskiUSAA 2 on at

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~~Coalesce() works~~

I thought Coalesce was working, but further testing seems to not work as expected.

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