Bad internet connection: Ability to wait until scan data is populated, before moving to new scan

[Anonymous]

Hi, 

I have developed a inventory scanning tool.

One of the users had bad internet connection, and the app kept scanning. 

He scanned Product A, Product B, Product C, and when looking at the scanned data, it populated Product C as 3 QTY and 0 QTY for both Product A, and Product B. 

I think this is because the data is constantly being overwritten because the App is able to scan, but the data is not being stored. 

During this, the gallery with the scanned data has the loading sign (3 dots) and not populating the data after each scan. 

Is there a way for the Scan button to be grey'd out (unclickable) until the previous scanned item is populated? 

Or the ability to use connection.connected or connection.metered to somehow fix this. 

Also, they're unable to move the inventory as it's in a hospital site, and they are in a basement with bad reception. 

[TiagoFreire]

Once you have the data in Excel as a Table, you can use said table as a datasource. 

You can load that table to a Collection, and like all collections, use SaveData() and LoadData() to preserve its contents for offline use. On iffy connectivity, loading every bit of data in collections and preserving them with SaveData() is important to maintain the app state if powerapps is closed and re-opened, as LoadData() will be the only source of information available when the app starts.

Then re-target the selectors to use the Collection instead of reading from the file directly. It is good for performance to have frequently used data  in Collections rather than pointing to data sources, especially if they do not change often. 

You can  design the app to just load the saved data by default, and have a button to 'refresh system data' that updates data from the table on OneDrive or SharePoint manually with one click, to be used when there is connectivity. 

It might even speed the app loading time, as you will not have do connect to OneDrive/SharePoint at startup. 

[Anonymous]

@TiagoFreire 

Ah, this is a great idea. 

Unfortunately I'm not able to use the Excel as the datasource.

I do have different portfolio of products, and thought I can filter it but it still exceeds the Excel sourced limit. 

I would have to use the SQL Server data source. 

Also, with one scan we can scan over 2000 unique products. (Exceeds the collection limit? Not sure if it applies here as it's stored in a memory rather than it displaying the information) 

Hoping that once I get enough data, I can filter the datasource to only the products at the hospital sites. 

(Not able to do this right now, and that's why it's the full list). With this, your idea will work and it will be a true offline mode that is quicker as well. 

[TiagoFreire]

Collections are not limited to 2000 items.

Fetching items is limited to 500 per fetch by default, but can be set to up to 2000 per fetch operation.

But collections can hold more.

The same principle would stand.

Even if the Collection is larger than 2k, SaveData and LoadData should be able to preserve it just fine.

I don't know if there are any additional properties that can be used to optimize the fetch operation to less then 2000 items, but you should use them to your advantage.

with SQL data source, you should be able to count the number of records, and if > 500 show a "load more" button, and use offset ... Limit to get the next batch of 500.

If you have permission to create views on the database, it may go e you additional data associations that may give you additional power to select and filter data.

If further manipulation is necessary and/or you can't create db views, putting Power Automate between PowerApps and the database can give you a lot of extra flexibility.

Including "cheating" to pack multiple rows as if they were a single record and unpack it on PowerApps with Ungroup().