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Trouble passing a URL with '#' through the PDF viewer

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Posted on by powerUser1611

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I am using Power Automate to return a PDF's content from a SharePoint Document Library and display it in a PDF Viewer in Power Apps. The user selects a document from the left-most gallery and it displays in the PDF viewer in the middle of the screen.

This flow runs great. It grabs the pdf content from the selected PDF in the Power App and returns it to the PDF viewer, which requires a URL. It then uses that URL to display the PDF in PowerApps. So far so good.

However, I want users to be able to open the PDF in particular places by selecting one of the 'In This Chapter' gallery items. I am trying to do this using a string like this (the '#' at the end of the URL):

The URL opens correctly in the browser, but whenever I pass a URL with '#' through my workflow, however, it returns an error:

Can anyone explain why this is and how to get around it? Being able to link directly to the section links is a desired feature within the app. I am trying to avoid hard-coding page numbers into the OnSelect property of each item.

Thanks!

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Building Power Apps

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BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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You can solve this by getting your flow to perform a replace() on the URL string, and replace any '#' with '%23'

Hope that helps,

Bryan

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powerUser1611 119 on at

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Hi @BCLS776, unfortunately that solution does not work. When # is replaced with %23, the URL returns a 'page not found' error.

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beallthings365 10 on at

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Hi @powerUser1611

I was the first person to discover the technique you're using to display PDF files stored in SharePoint libraries in Power Apps 😊.
https://masteroffice365.com/viewing-pdfs-from-sharepoint-within-powerapps/

So firstly - I am glad you find it useful for your app.

That said, I am afraid that is highly improbable that you'll find a solution to your requirements by passing any kind of parameter (i.e # Chapter) to the flow.

The step in the flow uses a SharePoint Get file content using path action that does not understand file type specific parameters such as the # character for PDF documents. Even if it did understand the request the subsequent step in the flow that returns the PDF file to Power Apps would equally fail to return the file in the desired chapter as it won't understand the request either.

That said, you may be able to implement an acceptable workaround if you can identify the page no each chapter in the PDF documents starts on. Before I elaborate on how this might work would this be an acceptable workaround for your solution?

PS: I'm nearly finished with a new blog that details a new never be blogged on / shared before method for displaying PDF files stored in SharePoint libraries in Power Apps 😁.

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