Gallery Modern Dropdown Choices Empty?

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Posted on by BenKraft

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I am running into an intermittent issue in which dropdowns in a gallery "forget" their contents.

I have a gallery of Sequence(5) with multiple contained input controls, including "modern" dropdowns with "Data source" fields set to very simple Dataverse table calls:

My expectation is that in every row, I will get the same options, since it doesn't depend on ThisItem. This works perfectly fine and consistently for the first row:

However, I will sometimes (can change upon app refresh) will have behavior where the dropdowns in the rows past the first "lose" their options, and show a strange blank list:

Other times it will show the full list of options as normal.

I know for a fact the options are not changing or being filtered through the gallery, why might this be happening? It is just a bug in the control in how it acts in a gallery?

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11manish 2,882 on at

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Based on your description, the most likely cause is a modern dropdown rendering issue inside a gallery, not a problem with the Dataverse table itself.

The best workaround is to load the options into a collection first and bind the dropdowns to the collection, or switch to classic dropdown/combobox controls,

which are generally more reliable in gallery scenarios.

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BenKraft 174 on at

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@11manish I have quite a few dropdowns in my app, I'm not a huge fan of creating a bunch of excess collections.

If all else fails, I will try using classic dropdowns, but it seems very strange that the modern controls consistently (or not so much) fail their single function in a seemingly very common use case.

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11manish 2,882 on at

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BenKraft I agree that excessive use of collections should generally be avoided. However, the approach often depends on the specific business scenario and any

platform limitations that need to be addressed.

In addition, modern controls are still evolving and may not always behave consistently in every situation. From experience, they can sometimes produce

unexpected results, especially in more complex scenarios involving galleries, dynamic data, or advanced logic.

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Valantis 6,341 on at

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Hi @BenKraft,

Modern dropdowns make individual Dataverse calls per row and the rendering engine sometimes doesn't wait for all calls to complete before rendering, leaving some rows empty.

Without creating a collection per dropdown, the cleanest workaround that avoids excessive collections:

Load each unique Dataverse table into a single collection on App OnStart:
ClearCollect(colYourTable, 'Your Dataverse Table')

Then bind all dropdowns in the gallery to the same collection instead of the direct Dataverse call. One collection per table, not per dropdown. If you have 5 dropdowns all pulling from the same table, they all share one collection.

This eliminates the per-row async Dataverse call issue entirely and is significantly faster since the data loads once.

If the tables are different per dropdown, you still only need one collection per unique table, not one per dropdown instance in the gallery.

Alternatively, report this to Microsoft via https://aka.ms/powerappsfeedback. Modern controls in galleries consistently failing on a basic use case is worth flagging to the product team.

Best regards,

Valantis

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❤️ If it didn’t fully solve it but was still useful, please click “Yes” on “Was this reply helpful?” or leave a Like :).

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WarrenBelz 155,660 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @BenKraft,

This blog of mine may also be useful in managing Choices values (it is SharePoint, but the principle is the same) and follows the direction that @Valantis is suggesting.

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Vish WR 3,571 on at

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it's one collection per unique table, not per dropdown instance, so 5 dropdowns pulling the same table still only need 1 collection in OnStart. That's a pretty lightweight footprint and fixes the async race condition causing the blank rows. Worth filing the feedback too, since this shouldn't happen on a basic same-table-every-row scenario.

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Kushal_M 225 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hello @BenKraft,

This is most likely a Modern Dropdown control issue inside a gallery, not a Data verse data problem—the control can render correctly in row 1 but intermittently show blank/empty options in later rows. A likely reason is that the modern dropdown makes separate data calls per gallery row, and the gallery may render before all those calls finish, so some rows appear empty. This behavior is consistent with other reported cases where modern controls in galleries/forms behave inconsistently, while classic controls work reliably. The most common workaround is to preload the dropdown options into a collection once (for example in App.OnStart) and bind every row’s dropdown to that collection instead of calling Data verse directly from each row. If you want the most stable fix, switch to classic dropdown/combo box controls or check Power Platform known issues / authoring version updates, since modern controls still have active reliability limitations.

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BenKraft 174 on at

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I am now attempting to use a named formula to do this "pre-collection" but running into the same issue. Is this not the entire point of named formulas, that the information is gathered once and is cached unless the source changes?

Why would this then not exhibit the same behavior of an App.OnStart action (which I have avoided since I believed it was being phased out)?

I understand that the named formula call happens when a control uses it (deferred), but would the first row being able to access the data not imply that the call happened successfully and is now cached for the remaining dropdowns to use?

Also, I'm not even confident that the "modern dropdown makes separate data calls per gallery row" claim is true, since in the Live Monitor, the getRows operation appears as a single call and the response time is equivalent for a gallery with 5 rows and 100 (which if each dropdown made a separate call would not be true).

Even if it was, is this not a very poorly made performance issue? What benefit could this have? This simply feels like a bug with the modern dropdown existing in a gallery.

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BenKraft 174 on at

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@Valantis @WarrenBelz @Vish WR

I tried using the collections method, but now my default values do not populate properly. Any idea why it might be the case that referencing the Dataverse tables directly or through named formulas allow for the default property to be set when a record is supplied but remains blank when the source is a collection? (Yes, I've confirmed the record does exist in the data source the collection is pulling from)

The difference being:

SortedSubInventories = SortByColumns([@'Watertown - Sub-Inventories'], "wtn_name");

for the named formula and:

ClearCollect(_SortedSubInventories, SortByColumns([@'Watertown - Sub-Inventories'], "wtn_name"));

For the collection.

While the modern dropdown has some nice features over the classic, (custom item label text, record-level defaults, etc), this seems like yet another rather glaring issue.

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Valantis 6,341 on at

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Hi @BenKraft,

if Monitor shows a single getRows call regardless of row count, that's good evidence against it. The root cause is likely something else in how modern dropdowns render within gallery virtualization.

On the Default value issue with collections: this is a known difference. When the Items source is a Dataverse table directly, the Default property can match records by their Dataverse record identity (the underlying ID).

When you switch to a collection, Power Apps loses that record identity reference and tries to match by value equality instead. If the record in your Default property comes from the original Dataverse table and your Items come from a collection copy, the equality check fails even if the data looks identical.

Fix for Default with collection:

- Make sure your Default property is also pulling from the same collection, not the original Dataverse table
- If your DefaultSelectedItems is something like LookUp('Watertown - Sub-Inventories', ...), change it to LookUp(_SortedSubInventories, ...) so both Items and Default reference the same in-memory source
- Alternatively use DefaultSelectedItems with a Table() wrapping a Filter of the collection

On the blank dropdown bug itself: since named formulas still reproduce it, this points to a rendering/virtualization bug specific to modern dropdowns in galleries. Worth submitting directly at aka.ms/powerappsfeedback with steps to reproduce. The product team needs repro cases for this.

Best regards,

Valantis

✅ If this helped solve your issue, please Accept as Solution so others can find it quickly.

❤️ If it didn’t fully solve it but was still useful, please click “Yes” on “Was this reply helpful?” or leave a Like :).

🏷️ For follow-ups @Valantis.

📝 https://valantisond365.com/

💼 LinkedIn

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