Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

We have an app to create new client projects that's been working pretty well. It creates a folder from a template in a SPO site, creates a channel in Teams, creates a Planner, and creates an item in an SPO list which I'm using as the database for the project creation.

The issue I'm trying to solve is that users are creating redundant projects that are either very similar in name or near duplicates. For example, a ficticious project may be David, Larry - 123 North Bay Road but different people (sometimes the same person!) might create a new project with a host of variations like "David - 123 N Bay Rd" or "123 North Bay Road".

I've already built substitutes into the app to replace Road with Rd and david with David and I'm trimming for spaces (though these are relatively recent changes so there are many dupes from before). I've looked at the function of the combobox which would be helpful for people to see that a project with "123" or "David" already exists. However, it's not exactly a text input and I'm not sure if this could be utilized as such (perhaps you can make the combobox value the textinput.text value and use a lable to diplay the results?)

What I think I want is to implement some sort of ai that could say, hey - it looks like a similar project already exists, are you sure you want to create this? It should know that "Davd - 123 N Bay Road" is the same as "David, Larry 123 North Bay Road". And it should work in realtime so when they're typing 'David, Lar' there should be something to indicate it is searching the SPO List and already sees a similar value (like the combobox does).

Is there any such function that could be utilized in PowerApps?

I see this "AI Builder" category in the forum but I'm not at all familiar with it.

Categories:

Building Power Apps

Hi @anthonys123 , Yes, you can use Power Apps combined with AI Builder’s Text Similarity model or Power Automate to detect near-duplicate entries in your SharePoint list. This allows real-time alerts when users type project names that resemble existing ones.

You're aiming to prevent users from creating redundant or near-duplicate projects in SharePoint by identifying similar names like:

• "David - 123 N Bay Rd" vs "David, Larry - 123 North Bay Road"

This goes beyond exact matches — you want fuzzy matching or semantic similarity

Solution Options:

• AI Builder – Text Similarity: Use AI to compare new project names against existing ones and flag near-duplicates in real time.

• Power Automate – Custom Logic: Normalize input (e.g., replace “Road” with “Rd”) and search SharePoint for similar entries using contains() or startsWith().

• ComboBox + Filter: Display existing project names dynamically as users type, helping them spot duplicates before submitting.

Sources:

• Detect duplicate data with match codes and rules – Microsoft Learn

• Power Automate Flow Identify Duplicates in Microsoft List – Stack Overflow

• Checking for Duplicates in a SharePoint List – Power Platform Community

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