Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I need to import SharePoint list into JSON or Power Apps collection (or something else) then have a dropdown of column names in Power Apps and display values just from that SharePoint column. This needs to be automatically updated as people add new columns in SharePoint- I don't want a hard code solution to this. With the new ParseJSON functionality, I wonder if this can be used somehow to extract column names, have these as items in a dropdown list then show user the contents of that column imported from SharePoint?

For example if you had a SharePoint list like this:

Title	Task 1	Task 2	Task 3
Person 1	Expert	Beginner	Average
Person 2	Expert	Average	Average
Person 3	Beginner	Beginner	Beginner

then I'd want this data brought into Power Apps and allow user to choose from Dropdown Task1, 2,3 then it would show the data for that and allow the user to then filter further on this for when = Expert, for example if they choose Task 1 in drop down and filter for Expert the app would show:

Person 1	Expert
Person 2	Expert

Categories:

Building Power Apps

Any obligation to receive the data in JSON? If you have nothing stopping you, you can simply connect the SP list to the application and create a collection of the data (this would be more obvious).

Like this:

ClearCollect(
 ColSpList,
 SharePointList
);

// or, to not load unnecessary data:
ClearCollect(
 ColSpList,
 DropColumns(
 SharePointList,
 "Column1",
 "Column2",
 ...
 )
)

Then, in Dropdown.Items:

ColSpList.Column

This way, in the OnVisible property of the screen that will contain the information, update the collection to always get newer information. Or do the update in App.OnStart. One way or another, always think about usability, since loading a lot of data directly influences the app.

Personal opinion:
- I wouldn't use ParseJSON since it's still experimental. It could break your app;
- Power Apps and JSON data don't play well together. I understand why so far, but going forward, they could implement a faster way to get data from an API, for example, from the SP itself in JSON. Much faster. Then yes, the ParseJSON function would make sense.