Welcome to another awesome post from the team here at NextStep Creations.
Today we’re going to be talking about QR Codes in PowerApps. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to dynamically generate QR codes with your own custom content.
Here’s an example of what it’ll look like:
The beauty of this is there’s no Flow involved, this is purely and solely PowerApps. Let’s get to it!
QR Code API – How to generate the image
For this tutorial, we’ll be using the QR Code Generator API , found here: http://goqr.me/api/
Replace “ti_QRContent.Text” with your TextInput (if you’ve renamed it).
Now, on the image, set the “Image” property to:
qrCode
Enter some text into the text input, click “Generate QR”.
You should see your image turn into a lovely QR Code!
Wrap-up and thoughts
This is a very simple and very powerful way to generate custom QR codes. This could be used for inventory management (Simple Inventory Management App – Part 1/3), or as a library or sorts, where you can embed links to content in QR codes and have users scan them.
As always with PowerApps, the possibilities are endless.
Reach out to the team on Twitter at NextStep Aus and let us know what you’ve built!
Have you ever wanted to do more with your favourite PowerPlatform and hit a wall? Well today we are going to shed some light on one of those walls… JSON
Now. Some will tell you that you require quite a bit of knowledge to understand and use JSON.
I am here to tell you today. They are dumb. You be you. Sit back, relax and read
NextStep Creations Basics of JSON and the PowerPlatform
So we start by ignoring the PowerPlatform as we need to layout some basic concepts first. In programming there are these things called type definitions. They do exactly as they say. Define types.
Some of the common types you will see as you start to Delve a bit deeper are as follows:
Integers (Also known as numbers or values) <– this little guy is a whole number so 123 is an integer and so is -123
Strings (Also known as text or str) <– this little guy is normally surrounded by “HI! I’m a string! “, it can also be surrounded by ‘yes these’
Booleans (Also known true/false, yes/no, on/off) <–This is as it states only two values. An ‘on’, ‘yes’, ‘1’ or ‘true’ and an ‘off’, ‘no’, ‘0’ or ‘false’
Objects (Also known as a record) <– Think of this guy as a row in a table. It will contain data for that entire row.
Arrays (Also known as a table) <– Think of this guy as the entire collection of items. You could say an Array is a collection of objects
NULL (Also known as blank) <– This one sometimes trips people up. As people assume that 0 or “Zero” is Null. However this is incorrect. Think of it this way: Zero: You have a toilet roll but there is no toilet paper left. You still know its a toilet roll though! Null: You have no toilet paper and no toilet roll.
Undefined <– this guy…. this bloody guy…. will ruin your day if you forget about him. Here is a nice image to assist me in defining what undefined is 🙂
Okay so now we have those little guys out of the way. Lets get into the SCARY code stuff. Here is an example describing a person… We are going to break it down:
Okay so every JSON file will contain { } these guys. They generally start and finish objects. As you can see above prior to First Name there is an open tag { then finally after spouse there is a close tag }
Starting from the top! “firstName”: is the first name column! now pay close attention to the quotes and the colon. For a column name quotes ‘ ” ‘MUST start and close the name followed by a colon ‘ : ‘.
Now we have {“firstName”: “John”, Here John is defined as the value for the firstName column. Please also note its surrounded in quotes as its a string and the line is closed with a comma ‘ , ‘. Something to note here, these commas have to be placed on every line of an object except the last! Remember this!
Moving down. “lastName”: is another column definition with the value “Smith”, <– again notice the comma.
“isAlive”: true, <– this one is slightly different as the words true and false without quotes surrounding them are defined as boolean values as described above.
“age”: 27, <– this value doesn’t require quotes either due to numbers being defined as integers if quotes are not surrounding the digits. So if you need a number type… Lose the quotes.
now “address”: { <– ooh! This one has another open tag. Meaning we have our first nested object. The contents of this one are clearly defined the same way. The biggest thing to note here is that the object MUST be closed so at the end you will notice }, meaning im finished defining this and move onto the next column
“phoneNumbers”: [ <– yay! learning! This one is the start of an array. Now remembering as above that an array is a collection of objects. Meaning you will generally see something like {object1}, {object2}, {object3} now these objects will be surrounded by [] as this dictates the array nature. Again ensure that you close this Array by using ], saying hey! I’m done here move onto the next column.
Okay now we have broken down how to read JSON. Lets move onto how our beautiful PowerPlatform reads JSON… SCHEMAS! We have performed some magic hiddin inside a JSON to JSON Schema converter to create the below:
Now please don’t get confused here. All you are seeing is the definition of what we have explained above.
These beautiful schemas are VERY important as they allow us to add predictability to our low code solution. We know what will be a string, Boolean, array or object.
In the above you will see the definition of each column and then its type defined just after. Now the reason I wanted to expand into Schemas in this post is these are where the headaches come from.
In a perfect world the data we enter in the system will be perfect… but lets be real… users are dumb…
So if your isAlive field requires a yes or no and some how the user enters “hello world” your system will catch fire.
Now you may want it to break if this happens. However. Sometimes you may need you system to keep running. What you could do is remove the type definition from your defined column so instead of: “isAlive”: { “type”: “boolean” } it would be: “isAlive”: {}
Something to note however. If you are passing data back to PowerApps… PowerApps hates undefined types. So don’t do this.. XD
Also something that might cause you headaches is this bit: “required”: [ “firstName”, “lastName”, “isAlive”, “age”, “address”, “phoneNumbers”, “children”, “spouse” ] This states that all of these fields are REQUIRED for your JSON to parse the data correctly. Now if for some reason age doesn’t always have data. Your environment will cry tears of blood. Not to fear! You can remove the required column names with the simple backspace key along with your hours upon hours of time spent debugging this dumb issue.
So something to note is you can also remove all of them so your required portion of the schema could look like this: “required”: [] <– just be careful as you MAY need to ensure data is in some fields.
Okay.. This is the walkthrough, breakdown, explanation, whatever you want to call it of something that took me much longer than I would like to admit to FULLY grasp.
I have not explained everything. Nor will I. However I hope this little post of mine can help you in expanding your apps, workflows or automation! If you have any questions or ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out to myself and the team on Twitter: NextStep Aus
Today we are back again…. Turning our boring HTML Table from PowerApps into a beautiful CSS Table with embedded images and with my limited HTML and CSS knowledge make it…. customer friendly
< !DOCTYPE html > < html > < head > < title > HTML Report < /title > < meta charset=”UTF-8″ > < meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″ >
Now if I can say anything…. Please do NOT copy the code below and expect it to work… The reason for this…. Bloody Quotations! This is a quotation that wont work ” This is a quotation that will work "
Special thanks to Reddit User ‘u/Knovar’ for experiencing this little bug so we can add it to the blog steps 🙂
Just make sure your quotes, symbols and special characters are on point as sometimes HTML and Website text editors like to just change things!
Now you will notice I am not adding the < style > tag here. This is for two reasons:
1. I am going to add quite a bit of CSS here… (Don’t know CSS? W3 Schools to the rescue! CSS Tutorial) The one thing variables in PowerAutomate does not like is lines and lines of visible text.
2. I don’t want to have to scroll or search 17 times looking for the once piece of HTML or CSS that I am trying to edit or change!
Next we are going to create another empty string variable.. This time instead of header content… you guessed it… var_HTMLStyle.
The above code sets some CSS Styles for my tables and my body content as well as a very important step…
It sets the page size as ‘A4’ If you intend on exporting this to PDF… You will love this little gem..
Okay home stretch we are going to replicate the above two steps..
But we are going to create a var_HTMLBody this will include thetag as well as some text if you desire
for us it will just be < body >
Then we are going to create a var_HTMLTable
This is the fun bit… The below piece of code (which will be the content of our var_HTMLTable String variable) Defines the tables Header, the tables CSS Style and the table header columns. Notice we do not yet close the table HTML
This builds our table row… One at a time… in the correct order…. 🙂
It should look like this:
Now after our apply to each we have to add some important steps. It joins all our string variables together to make our finished HTML
The steps are as follows: 1. Close our Table with < /table > 2. Close our body with var_HTMLTable < /body > 3. Close our HTML Header with var_HTMLStyle var_HTMLBody < /HTML >
It should look something like below:
Finally use the var_HTMLHeader as the file content for your Create File action from the first Blog
Now lets run this with content from before:
Old Table for comparison:
Hope this helps!
Taking your PowerApps and PowerAutomate Skills the NextStep
PowerApps – Clearing a currently selected Radio Button
Welcome all, to the first installment of Powerapps QuickBits, where we talk about radio button tricks! These posts will be short snippets and tutorials on useful implementations in PowerApps. Let’s get started!
Step 1 – PowerApps Layout
Nice, quick and easy setup. Add your radio button and set it’s items to whatever you’d like the options to be.
Step 2 – Radio Button Properties
There’s two different properties we need to manipulate for this to work:
Welcome to -33.796141, 151.178358! Wait, that doesn’t look right.
Hey everyone! Welcome to another tutorial from myself and the team at NextStep Creations. Today we’re using PowerAutomate to convert a latitude and longitude value to a readable address. In a previous blog we looked at Google Maps in PowerApps.
In this, we cover the ability to use a devices GPS coordinates to provide a location. But, if you were ever to display these, or print them or send them to a report (see Creating a HTML Report), they would come out as just a string of numbers, which isn’t ideal.
See Google Maps might know what to do with those numbers, but we don’t. So I’m going to show you how to convert those into something a bit more “human”.
Step 1 – Set up your Flow (PowerAutomate)
Make sure you have a Google Maps Developer account. See the Google Maps in PowerApps tutorial for info on how to do this.
For this section, we’ll need to get an API Key for the Geocoding segment. Here’s a tutorial on how to do this: Get Geocoding API Key
We’re going to be working with PowerAutomate (Microsoft Flow) and PowerApps today. Create a new flow, and name it “convertAddress”, Add the PowerApps trigger, and then a HTTP step after that:
Perfect! Set the Method to “GET” and set the URI to the following code:
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=@{triggerBody()[‘HTTP_URI’]}&key=YOUR API KEY HERE
Make sure to replace the key value with your API Key. You should now have a HTTP step that looks like this:
Sweet! Let’s move on. In this next section, I’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting for you. In another blog post we’ll talk about how to correctly set up a Parse JSON step, but for now, here’s one I prepared earlier.
Add a Parse JSON step, and set the “Content” to the Body of the HTTP step previous. In the schema, click this link and copy all of the text. Your Parse JSON step should look like so:
Lets create a variable to store the address in. Add an Initialize Variable step, name it formattedAddress, set the type to String and the value to:
More on the above in the blog we’re writing about JSON.
Now add a “Respond to a PowerApp or flow step, and set the output variable to the formattedAddress variable we made:
Brilliant! Time to go to PowerApps.
Step 2 – Create PowerApps & tag the Flow
Alright, nice and easy. Create a new PowerApp, and add a button. We’re going to create a proof of concept app, to show that your latitude and longitude can be successfully converted to an address.
You can expand on this if you wish by adding the Google Maps ability like we’ve shown: Google Maps in PowerApps
Here’s my app layout:
To get the text label to show my location, I’ve set the text property as follows:
Come one come all, to an undisclosed location on the Internet!
Oh wait, we have Google Maps now…..here’s the address. Hey everyone, Jacob here again. Today we’re going to be discussing using the Google Maps API inside of your PowerApps to give easy to use, easy to visualize locations, either by using the physical device’s latitude and longitude, or by manually typing in a street address. First off, here’s a little teaser of what you can expect to make at the end of this….
As you can see, we have a fully functioning location setup! We can either use a manually entered address (first photo), or use the devices inbuilt GPS functionality to figure out the coordinates of the user!
Step 1 – Design the PowerApps Layout
Let’s get started. Fairly simple PowerApp layout, I’ve added notes on this image to make it easier to understand:
Okay! Nice and easy so far. You’ll see that in that photo I mentioned I’d elaborate on the latitude/longitude text label, so here goes:
This label is set up to show either the current Latitude and Longitude of your devices if the address input is blank.
If it isn’t blank, it will display whatever address has been manually entered.
To achieve this, set the Text property of the label to the following:
So this part requires a few moving parts. Let’s break it all down.
Getting a Google Maps Static API Key
To get images from Google we need to have a key. A key is tagged to a Google account, and verifies that it’s you making the request.
To get this, we need to sign up to a Google Developers account. You can use your existing Google/GMail account for this. Follow this link and click “Get Started” to sign into your account: Google Developer – Maps
Create your first project and agree to the terms:
You’ll have to set up a billing account in the next stage. I won’t walk you through this section as it’s fairly straightforward.
You’ll need to get an API key next, Here is a great guide from Google on how to do so: Get an API Key
Okay! Once you’ve completed all that and got your Google Maps Static API Key, it’s back to PowerApps!
Step 3 – Configuring the image
What we’re going to do is use the Google Maps API to return us a static map image that we can display. There are a lot of parameters that you can pass to this API (full list here). The ones we care about are:
Zoom
Size
Markers
Key
We’ll get more in-depth as to what an API is in other blogs, so for now here’s the code:
Woah that’s a lot of ampersands. We use these to concatenate strings togethter in PowerApps. This section of code defines the map height and width, based off the size of our image control in PowerApps. The end section of this defines the markers as red, and size of medium.
Okay final section! This part will pass the location value to the API. You can see it checks to see whether the address entry text input is empty or not.
If it’s empty, pass the latitude and longitude of the devices GPS
If it isn’t empty, pass the address entered in the text input
Also, replace the section at the end with your API key (right where it says YOUR API KEY HERE). And you’re done!
Okay, throw all of that into the Image property of the media we added before, like so:
Almost done!
Final thing, set the OnSelect property of the button to the following code:
Do you get shivers every time your client or boss asks for a report of that beautiful PowerApps Gallery you built for them? This post will give you the tools you need to create beautiful PDF reports with and without images using our wonderful PowerPlatform and a little code magic.
The very first thing you are going to want to do is setup a Gallery or Collection in PowerApps <– This is what we will be using as our base for our report. Lets take a look at my very basic app that tells some real truths:
As you can see we have three columns – Description, Purchase and Notes We are going to export the 4 rows of a snapshot of my life (dont tell my wife) to PowerAutomate where we will formulate our amazing HTML. The code to do this is quite simple – but first we need to create our flow.
Above you see two things: 1. The first is our PowerApps trigger. This is what allows us to call and send data to the PowerAutomate Workflows (Flows). 2. The second is an Initailise Variable step with Type Array and a nice name. We at NSC use var_ to start our variables so they are all the same scheme.
The beautiful thing about the PowerApps Connector is that it also does something else for us. As you can see it lets us Ask in PowerApps as a dynamic value option. This creates a PowerApps Variable with the name of the control:
Notice the name of the variable varitemsFromPA_Value and look at the name of the initialise variable step: var_itemsFromPA_ <– take note of this.. when you are dealing with 100’s of these, your naming scheme will save your headache!
So quickly recapping… We have a PowerApp with Data and a Workflow with a setup ready to receive it… Lets join them.
I have added a button to my PowerApp > I have clicked on my button > I have clicked actions in the top header > I have clicked Power Automate and Now I simply have to select my requested flow.
I have now selected createReportDemo (My Workflow’s name and its adding to my button)
Oh No! It failed to register… This is something you WILL run into when you are playing with Flow and PowerApps… The trick here. PowerApps can accept and receive only one thing… Text (strings, words, characters, bits) it only deals with Text…
So when we created our variable as type array that puts a request to PowerApps to send an Array reponse. It cannot complete this action so it FAILS! Don’t fear though. This isn’t a stopping point; we just have to change our functions slightly
To Remove a PowerApps Variable you have to remove the Trigger from the Flow:
Okay we have cleared that Variable… Now lets change the variable type:
Now lets re-request our PowerApps Variable:
Okay now we are ready to head back to the PowerApp.
BOOM!
We are now ready to start adding our code to the no code solution! 🙂
In the function bar at the top of the PowerApp if you select this…
It shows you your beautiful NAMED variable that it is asking for
These are mandatory. If you ask for two you must provide both responses. Hence why I showed you how to delete incorrect variables above… cause god dammit man we are only human!
My collection here is called expenses (which contains all the columns and data)
We are using Ignore Unsupported Types because I dont want to deal with NULL value checking today you can read more about this here: JSON Functions We will cover JSON in more depth in blog posts to come!
So we now have a button that will send all our data from PowerApps to PowerAutomate in a JSON format and a PowerAutomate Workflow that will grab that response and put it into a string variable for us… GREAT!
Time for the HTML…. WRONG we have to do some dumb stuff first…
Your beautiful button you created earlier… Press it.. Press it now!
Hopefully it will run your flow and you will get a succeeded response like below:
We are now going to open that response:
See that beautiful Value there… right now it contains [{BLAH BLAH BLAH
This is our JSON code and what we need to copy for this step:
Okay now we have our sample code lets jump into the Workflow’s edit mode:
Insert a _Parse JSON_ action and provide the content as the var_ variable we defined earlier
Now see that Schema is required … SMASH Generate from Sample and dump our copied notes from our succesful run in there
Then click done!
Now our JSON is entered we can continue
Add a new step – Create HTML Table
The Content for this is the Dynamic Body of our Parse JSON
I have added a comment so you can see the real expression (if you care)
Okay home stretch…
This Create OneDrive for Business connector might cause you some grief… its not you… its Power Automate…
There are two solutions to resolve this error:
Export your flow… then simply re-import your flow….. Yup… OR
Delete your flow…. then delete your OneDrive for Business Connector from the connectors screen on the left…. Create the OneDrive for Business Connector again and finally recreate your flow
Add a Create OneDrive for Business File:
The Filename MUST contain .HTML here
The File Content is the body response of our Create HTML Table
Next Add a Convert File (Preview) Action:
Here our *File: is the ID of the above created File and Type is as you request. However as the title suggests this is to PDF!
Finally…
Add a Create File action…
Here we are going to just play match the names and use the File Name and File Content of our Convert File action:
And Thats it…
This final step will create our PDF and save it to the defined location. You can fancy this up but that will be part two of this post 🙂
Here is the output of this basic PowerApp and PowerAutomate Workflow: