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Complex form performance issue

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Posted on by NaivePowerApper Microsoft Employee

My app includes a fairly complicated form - large number of fields, many with show/hide logic.

When users work in the form, it frequently hangs, especially when the user is typing in a text field. This results in a poor user experience.

Performance in the rest of the app, including other, less complicated forms is fine.

Are there any suggestions/best practices for ensuring adequate performance for large complex forms?

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Nandit 1,568 Moderator on at

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Hi NaivePowerApper,

One of the ways I have dealt with large forms being complicated to manage and fill out is by creating steps for the input process. Idea is to divide your big form into smaller sections by combining related fields and using the visible property.

Reza Dorrani put up a really nice video explaining it - Creating Multi-Step Forms in Power Apps | Tutorial (youtube.com)

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,

Nandit

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WarrenBelz 153,079 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi NaivePowerApper

You did not say how many controls were on the Form, however one approach (if you have not already done this) would be to delete any redundant controls - the first two would be the star and error text labels inside your data cards on any input that you are not making Required. You may find some other elements that are not necessary (use HintText/InputTextPlaceholder instead of labels on the fields) and/or combine row labels into a "header" above the row. Essentially reduce the number of controls that the Form needs to resolve. How many controls are on this Form ?

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NaivePowerApper Microsoft Employee on at

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Follow-up on this question – I was able to resolve the issue using a mix of approaches.
Issue details:

Large classic form (277 cards) and lots of embedded logic:

Show hide logic for cards – show or hide cards based on user selections

Tab system for navigating the form

Filter Combo box items based on user selections in other combo boxes

Form performance was unsatisfactory. In particular, form would hang when users were typing in text boxes

Observations:

Performance issues appeared to be limited to the form. Other controls on the same screen didn’t appear to be affected

A smaller, but similarly complex Modern Form in the same app didn’t appear to be impacted

Conclusions:

Issue was specific to the form, likely the result of size plus complexity

The Modern form control might perform better

Initial Approaches:

Tried WarrenBelz’s suggestion to delete unnecessary controls from each card. This appeared to help, but more improvement was required

I’m pretty confident Nandit’s suggestion to break the form up into multiple steps would’ve worked. However, ability to scroll through the whole form was a desired.

Solution:

Break up the form in a way that is seamless to the user:

Create a vertical container containing 5 Modern forms stacked on top of each other

Due to other updates, the five forms now contain a total of 321 cards, but the largest form is only 82 cards

Dynamically adjust the LayoutMinHeight property for each form based on which cards are visible at any given time. This means user sees a single vertical scroll bar on the vertical container. From a user perspective it looks like a single seamless form.

Delete all unnecessary controls in the cards

This appears to have resolved the performance issues without disrupting the user experience

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