@iwonder
So, your ForAll is backward in the formula you have. AND, this is a good example of the power of using ForAll as intended.
The purpose of a ForAll is to return a Table of records. It is not a ForLoop like you would use in a development language.
The syntax of the ForAll is essentially two parameters. The first is the table of records that you want to iterate over and the second is the record that you want to return for each iteration.
It is important to understand that ForAll will do the above action regardless of what you intend it to do. So, if you intend to try and make it a ForLoop, it will still do the above and will create a Table of records based on the second parameter.
Your second parameter is a collect statement - this will return, for each iteration of the table, a modified table that the collection represents. Since you are not providing a schema for your records, the ForAll will stuff this all into a column called Value. So, your result of the ForAll will be a table with a single column called Value that will have many iterations (rows from source) of the entire table of results from each Collect statement.
Now, in your scenario, this is probably not a huge overhead on performance and memory, but this ForAll as a ForLoop is often used incorrectly and PowerApps will have all of the overhead and impact on performance to generate large tables of results...that, based on the formula, are then discarded.
So, your formula based on your example should be:
ForAll(
// Parameter 1 - source table
Split("Monitor,2;Mouse,1;Keyboard,3",";"),
// Paremeter 2 - record schema
{PeripheralType:First(Split(Result,",")).Result,
PeripheralCount:Last(Split(Result,",")).Result
}
)
The above formula will return a table with records based on the provided schema (columns) for each row of the source table (the Split of the text).
In terms of performance (and typing), this can be further simplified to:
ForAll(
// Parameter 1 - source table
Split("Monitor,2;Mouse,1;Keyboard,3",";"),
// Paremeter 2 - record schema
With({_res: Split(Result,",")},
{PeripheralType:First(_res).Result,
PeripheralCount:Last(_res).Result
}
)
)
This will keep PowerApps from constantly performing the Split function for each column of the record.
Now, the above returns a table...what you do with it after that is up to you.
You can use the above on an Items property of any control.
Or, if you want to have this available as a table in the app, then set a variable to the above results.
Set(glbSplits, <theAboveFormula>)
Or, if you need the ability to add, remove or change the resultant records, assign it to a collection.
ClearCollect(colSplits, <theAboveFormula>)
I hope this is helpful for you.
