Newbie question - advice on planning / design

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hi there,

I am newbie on this forum and this is my first post 🙂

Having started to spend more time with PowerApp, my thinking process for this app is

1) I got a list of say records of 5 companies consisted of company names, contact details etc... this stores on excel spreadsheet.

2) I can connect my powerApp using excel as my data source

3) Imaging a page with a single company record, with a button when click fire off an API that retrieve information from https://opencorporates.com/ which passes the query / name of current company's name. For example if my current record is called Apple, this button will trigger a API call with this URL https://opencorporates.com/companies?q=Apple

4) This API will trigger Flow to do the calling process and retrieve results (I think I am OK with the Flow bit)

5) Return the result from FLOW back to PowerApp (assuming I want just top 10 records return)

6) I want the ability to select just one record from the result then bind Open Corporate's Company Number with my PowerApp Company Number (which is a blank column in excel used as the data source)

7) Save the info

Please can someone kindly explain to me or point me to the right direction on how to do this? I think the bit I couldn't seem to get my head round is ability to use data returned from API called in flow and select just one result to bind with my records (step 6-7).

In fact I dont think I know how to do 1-7 over all to be honest 😄

Thank you in advance for your help / advice.

Pedzilla

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Building Power Apps

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Mr-Dang-MSFT Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Anonymous,

It sounds like you want to:

select a company from a table

scrape information about the company from a website upon clicking a button.

Here's some things you'll need to know:

Connect Excel to Power Apps: sounds like you know how to do this

Make an HTTP call in Power Automate:
Every API works differently, so it's good to see multiple examples from the community. Here's one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ybpf-VJyrk

Return the response from the HTTP action in Power Automate to Power Apps.
Here's a blog post on sending arrays back to Power Apps:
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/return-an-array-from-flow-to-powerapps-response-method/
Substitute the step in SQL with your HTTP request instead and it works with the same principle.

Power Apps expects a strictly consistent set of columns to be returned from Power Automate. Look carefully at what is returned from the website you're checking.

Does it return the actual rows you want? Or do you need to drill in one level to get to the rows?

Are the columns consistent from one HTTP request to another or are there null fields?

Below is an example of using the Google Books API.

The columns change depending on the book: not all of them have sale links and ISBN numbers.

So I do some steps to filter out those exceptions.

Then I pancake the data so it's easier to work with in Power Apps

Link: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Edu-Simplify-Google-Books-API/td-p/442893

Adding some regulars who work with HTTP:

@ThatAPIGuy @PaddyFreefall
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi there Brian that’s very nice of you. Thank you that’s quite enough for me to get started! Will ask more if I’m stuck 🙂