Displaying SharePoint multi-line text. Only last line is displayed.

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Posted on by OldDogNewTricks

I have a SharePoint list, TicketList that includes a column named Notes, which is defined as:

I have successfully added notes which append to earlier notes. See example:

However, when trying to display the notes, only the most recent note (at the top of the list) is displayed:

I would like to display all of the notes, and all of the metadata related to those notes (author and datetime). My example of the 8 notes does not show the author, but it is captured.

I've tried rich text and plain text, with same results.

My current iteration is to display it using a Text Input control but have also attempted to list it using a Gallery, with same results. The Text Input properties for Format is TextMode.Multiline, and Format is TextFormat.Text.

Thanks in advance.

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Building Power Apps

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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The problem is the way that the Append to Text option works in SharePoint. In that kind of column each change is saved as its own version. But when SharePoint displays the column it gathers all the previous versions and displays them in the column. Power Apps doesn't have that ability natively. I've done this for a client once in the past. We found that we had to use a Power Automate flow that used REST to retrieve all the previous versions of the column and store them in a string that was sent back to power apps for display.

My advice is to change the design if possible to do the column differently because of the amount of work involved to work with this column setting.

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OldDogNewTricks on at

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Thanks @Pstork1.
I had initially created a 2nd List named TicketNotes that included a Lookup column named TicketID for the TicketList record where TicketID is a lookup to TicketList.ID. I was able to add those notes successfully but was never able to display them successfully on my Canvas App. I actually prefer the separate list approach as it appeals to my relational database design esthetic.

Is that what you had in mind when you suggested a redesign?

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Pstork1 68,697 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Either that or just having all of the Notes in a single field and storing the whole thing each time by turning off the append feature. That would require somehow adding the user and time to the note as well so the separate list would be easier. If you add a field to the second list that will have the ID of the record in the first list you can easily pull up the second list in a Data table or Gallery filtered on the ID from the first list. That would be the way I would do it.

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