Get PowerApps Canvas App Session Information to Start and End a Flow

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Posted on by marlson

Hello,

My team has built a Power Apps canvas app for reporting time. The dataset is a SharePoint list.

We want to to log all entries modified during a Power Apps session so that we can send a summary of the modifications by email.

I am wondering if it is possible to measure when a Power Appssession is started and when it ends in Power Automate. Ideally, a flow starts once a user opens the app and ends when the user closes the app.

We do not want to add any button to start or end a session as this will affect the user experience and we cannot guarantee that a user would properly "end" a session with a button instead of closing the tab or the browser.

Anyone know if this is possible or does anyone have a different approach?

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Building flows

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RobElliott 10,323 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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@marlson there are no triggers or actions related to when a Power Apps session starts or ends. I think what you'll need to do is to use a recurrence schedule trigger and set it to run every weekday or every 2 hours or whatever interval you select. You'd then add a compose action to get the time 2 hours ago and then a SharePoint get items action with a filter query set to Modifed ge '{outputs of the compose}' and Modified le '{expression utcNow()).

You'd then probably want a Select action (not an apply to each), the a create html table action then a send an email action with the table in the body. That way only one email is sent instead of 1 email for each item modified.

Rob
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Mitanshu 1,650 Moderator on at

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Within your SharePoint List, you should create a text column for SessionID and each time something is modified from the App, you can update the SessionID text field.

You can get SessionID as described under https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/power-fx/reference/object-host#sessionid-property

Host.SessionID

This way when you send out email notifications, you can make your Power Automate to send one email per SessionID

Now, how to capture start and end time considering you may have parallel number of users and each session could be of varying length...

Start
Your App has an OnStart property ... you can use that to store SessionID, User().Email and StartTime in a separate SharePoint List - SessionMater.

End
If your user is not doing an action - like clicking a button in the App, then it may not be possible to capture the End of the session. In such a situation, you have to make an assumption that each session ends after X hours, based on what your users are supposed to be doing in the App and how long it is typically going to take

Power Automate Flow
Using above approach, your trigger should be when a new item is created in SessionMaster
Then you add a delay action for X hours
Now you pull all records from main SharePoint List where SessionID = the row that was created in SessionMaster and triggered the Flow
You send one email with information of all records from the main SharePoint List

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