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"Suspend" Behavior of a Mobile PowerApp

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Posted on by flyte

Say I am in my observation recording PowerApp (MyApp) on an iPhone and I have entered some data on a screen, then I suspend the phone to go do something else.

What is the "resume" behavior? Is the powerapp brought up exactly at the screen where it was left? Or must the user re-launch the PowerApp application and then re-select the MyApp from the list. In this case, I am assuming all state is lost?

There may be a long period of time between recording an observation. Does this influence the "type" of app I must create to ensure state is preserved? (i,e,: update sharepoint list using an appropriate "master / details" layout vs: the employee engagement survey type app where data is persisted once last question is entered).

I'd appreicate some guidance!

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Building Power Apps

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TschoofBAH 154 on at

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Afaik, from my testing (mind you I am on android), I am able to open an add page for my app, start entering data, "suspend" the app to do other things, and comeback to where I left off. But...I know with android taht after a set amount of time (or set amount of apps being opened) that the capability to go back like that diminishes. Traditionally android apps have code to handle that situation, but for powerapps I am not fully sure. I will say for certain there is no capability that I have seem where you could say restart the phone completely and come back to where you were, but that behaivior is common amongst most phone apps...though I could think of some creative (albeit difficult and complex) ways you could mimic that ability.

But....from what you said your main issue is the time in between recordings and the possibility of the app closing on you during the extended time. For that you could make sure to save as you go, and have a conveinient way to edit the last item you were looking at, rather than trying to capture the complete addition of the record in one go.

If you wanted to do that, you could use an excel file as a data item to track the last added item, and use that data to "automatically" put you back there when you view the list again....defnitely a lot of possibilities.

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v-micsh-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @flyte,

Please check the reply from @davidni in the following thread:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/PowerApps-Forum/Powerapp-timeout/td-p/15194

Quote:

"

I'm sorry you went through this and ended up losing some work. Are you using the web version of PowerApps (create.powerapps.com)? If so, we currently have a limit on session duration of about 2 hours which you might be hitting. As you approach the limit, you will see a message dialog informing you that the session is about to expire and that you should save your work. When a session expires, you could lose changes that you made to the app (e.g. adding a screen, changing controls, formulas, etc), but this has no impact on data stored in your app's connections. For example, if your app saves an entry into a Sharepoint list, the entry will be preserved even if the PowerApps session times out.

We are looking into lifting the session duration limit, but for now the recommendation is that you save your app often and start a new session if you need more time. I hope this helps, and we encourage you to go to https://powerapps.uservoice.com/ if you have suggestions on how to make this better. It will help us prioritize the features we work on.

David Nissimoff [MSFT] ** PowerApps Staff

"

For testing, if I leave PowerApps App open where it is with IOS device, left to work with the other stuffs, then come back again, the App would stay where it was left. This is also the same with the PowerApps studio from Windows Store.

Another thing that might affect this should be the domain policy.

Regards

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