Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello, to expand upon the title the issue we are having is as follows:

NOTE: I have discovered that my company doesn't have the premium version of Microsoft Business 365 nor do they plan to acquire it, therefore I'm limited in what actions I can put into my flow to just the ones that are non-premium/free

I'm currently in the process of trying to develop a canvas app to manage some of our routine monthly inspections around our facility. The basic concept is as follows: There is a sharepoint list with the equipment to be inspected. The list contains the ID column (auto-generated by sharepoint), A column containing the physical number on the equipment (a string of text for reference), a column containing the physical location of the equipment (also a string of text for reference), as well as various columns that would be used for data entry by the end user (equipment good, equipment needs repairs, special comments, etc.).

The idea is that the end user uses a PowerApp to scan a QR Code on the physical equipment which would run through a flow triggered from powerapps to get the correct item on the list and return the pertinent info back to powerapps. From there the data is stored in a collection, some small code navigates the end user to display or details screen where they can then do some data entry that will run a secondary flow to send the data back to the sharepoint list and update it with the info from the inspection. Fairly simple in concept.

However, we are having an issue with the primary flow. Namely, we've been trying to find a way to pass the info from the Get Item action back to powerapps and we are running into two issues: 1) We've discovered that the Get item action "limit columns by view" is broken and will not display any of our view choices aside from the default Allitems view that the list has when it was created. Further compounding this issue is the fact that even when the columns are limited by view or narrowed in scope somehow, the Get item action returns a bunch of hidden and inaccessible "support information" columns that have nothing to do with the information we want (Things like the employee's ID, email address, the hyperlink to the sharepoint list. Basically a bunch of metadata that is ultimately useless bloat in this endeavor) which leads us to the second half of this problem; 2) When passing this information back to powerapps via a Respond to a PowerApps or flow action, it does indeed send the output of Get item back (along with all the useless bloat) which is then collected in a collection via a clearcollect function in powerapps to store the data as whatever name it was assigned to return.

The issue with this is that the "respond to a powerapps or flow" action sends the data from Get item as a giant object which, once it gets collected by our clearcollect function in powerapps turns into a collection yes, but its a collection just called something like "FlowResult" that only has a single entry (running it dynamically therefore there is no data in the collection when viewed in powerapps) when viewed on the collections screen in powerapps. It doesn't parse the information in the JSON object that is sent out into its component columns (i.e. EquipmentNumber, EquipmentLocation, Comments, etc.) so that each component can be referenced by fields in the apps from the collection as the bound data source in something like a details screen.

We've tried sending the information to the powerapps as a string and while that did work, the collection is still defined in powerapps as a single entry containing all the information in the string and not parsed out into its logical components for use.

Is there a way to pass the information back to powerapps and actually collect it in its easily referenced component columns using only the non-premium tools on power automate and powerapps.

A picture of our current flow is provided. Thank you for any help.

reddit post screenshot powerapps.PNG