Is there a way to filter all the items in a pulldown menu?

[galos]

I have a filter that currently is tied to a pulldown menu of items from a collection. I'd like to know if there is a way to configure something where not only can I select a person in the pulldown menu, and it sorts it by the person selected, but to also be able to sort it by all the people in that specific pulldown list.

I know this may sound familiar - but I assure you it's not the easy button. I know you're probably thinking I should add an "All" to the pulldown list - but let me explain further. I cannot use "All" in a pulldown list because filtering with the ALL command (while it does pull All the records), does not pull only the exact records I need from SP List. The pulldown items in the collection are a smaller subset of All the data in the SP List, so I only want all of the items shown that are associated with the names in that specific pulldown list.

So for instance, if the pulldown has a list of the following:

Jerry

June

Mary

I would like to have a way to search for all records with Jerry, June and Mary in them. I do not want to filter "All" because "All" returns my entire SP List of all names in that column, which is not what I'm trying to achieve.

I was wondering if a loop statement would be applied here where I could filter the collection with a loop, but I think that would get very intensive as the SP List is large.

Any help is greatly appreciated - thanks in advance!

[WarrenBelz]

Hi @galos ,

I am assuming here you have a multi-select combo box and want to select multiple items and then want to check each of those selected items for any matches in th data source field ? I have to assume that the data source field is Text - if it is a multi-choice field, then that creates a many-to-many relationship and is quite a different answer.

For the above, the structure would be like this (not Delegable)

With(
   {
      wItems:
      Concat(
         ComboBox.SelectedItems,
         Value, 
         " "
      )
   },
   Filter(
      DataSource,
      FieldName in wItems
   )
)

OR with a bit more Delegation control

Ungroup(
   ForAll(
      ComboBox.SelectedItems As aSel,
      Filter(
         DataSource,
         FieldName = aSel.Value
      )
   ),
   "Value"
)

if you have a multi-select column as the target

Ungroup(
   ForAll(
      ComboBox.SelectedItems As aSel,
      Filter(
         DataSource,
         aSel.Value in FieldName
      )
   ),
   "Value"
)

which is not Delegable

Please click Accept as solution if my post helped you solve your issue. This will help others find it more readily. It also closes the item. If the content was useful in other ways, please consider giving it Thumbs Up.

MVP (Business Applications)   Visit my blog Practical Power Apps

[galos]

Good grief this site is going to frustrate me. This is the second time I am writing this post from scratch because I keep getting marked as spam and it deletes it.  So if you see two of these, I apologize in advance. Trying to go off memory in this post......

@WarrenBelz  thank you for your response. I hadn't considered a combo box, so that might be more effective here. I was just using a pulldown with "All" as the first item, but that's not been working so hot for me.  Here is more information that might be helpful for what I'm trying to do:

Consider these two tables using Sharepoint List as the datasource:

Table1:

Region        VP               Director           Manager

North          Mary               Barbara            Richard

South           Paul               Jim                    Louise

South           Paul               Jim                    Joe

South           Paul               Jim                    Mary

South           Paul               Jim                    Joanne

East              Tom              Sam                   Deborah

...

Table2:

Messages      Director         Manager

Item1               Jim                   Louise

Item2               Jim                   Louise

Item3               Jim                   Louise

Item4               Jim                   Joe

Item5               Jim                   Mary

Item6               Barbara            Richard

..

First, the VP, Director and Manager fields in Sharepoint List are of type "People or Group". Also, from a delegation standpoint, know that Table1 won't get much larger than 200 rows - it's currently about 50 rows. Table2, however, will be much larger - it could get to be well over 5k records.

My form consists of a gallery on the bottom with three pulldowns at the top, along with a search box. The three pulldowns are "VP", "Director" and "Manager". I'd like to populate these pulldown items using Table1 (I haven't figured out cascading yet but would love to be able to do this for this screen if possible too).

So for instance, when Jim (Director) logs in, I'd like his pulldown items for Manager to only show "Louise", "Joe", "Mary" & "Joanne", but not "Richard" or "Deborah". It would be great if it could display all items associated to all of his managers (Item1-Item5) but as Jim selects a manager from the pulldown, it would only show him that manager's messages. Using a combo-box, as you suggested, I believe would allow Jim to select multiple managers as well as all by clicking on all of them.

Since this gallery could get rather large for someone like Paul (Jim's VP), who would log in and see much more, I'd like to include that search box to filter things out in the gallery.

So, for the task at hand, regarding this thread, populating the Manager dropdown items is what I've been struggling with. I have been trying to do something similar to the following, without success:

Lookup(Table1, Director.email = User().Email).Manager.DisplayName

However, the editor is underlining "DisplayName" and saying "Expected Table Value"

I'm not sure how to best code this and hope I'm not going down the wrong path. Any thoughts?

Many Thanks!!

[WarrenBelz]

Hi @galos ,

I must admit I perceived a very different requirement from your initial post, hence the complexity. The other thing I will add here is that Person fields are making this far more complicated than it needs to be (I do use them very infrequently).

LookUp(
   AddColumns(
      Table1, 
      "ManagerName",
      Manager.DisplayName
   ),
   Director.Email = User().Email
).ManagerName

Your Combo Box Items - VP

Sort(
   Distinct(
      AddColumns(
         Table1,
         "VPName",
         VP.DisplayName
      ),
      VPName
   ).Result,
   Result
)

Director

Sort(
   Distinct(
      AddColumns(
         Filter(
            Table1,
            VP.DisplayName = YourVPCombo.Selected.Result
         ),
         "DirectorName",
         Disrector.DisplayName
      ),
      DirectorName
   ).Result,
   Result
)

Manager

Sort(
  AddColumns(
      Filter(
         Table1,
         VP.DisplayName = YourVPDD.Selected.Result && 
         Director.DisplayName = YourDirectorCombo.Selected.Result
      ),
      "ManagerName",
      Manager.DisplayName
   ).ManagerName,
   ManagerName
)

Please click Accept as solution if my post helped you solve your issue. This will help others find it more readily. It also closes the item. If the content was useful in other ways, please consider giving it Thumbs Up.

MVP (Business Applications)   Visit my blog Practical Power Apps

[galos]

Hi @WarrenBelz 

Thank you for helping me with this. Can you help me understand where I would put this portion of the code?

Lookup(
   AddColumns(
      Table1, 
      "ManagerName",
      Manager.DisplayName
   ),
   Director.Email = User().Email
).ManagerName

Would this go in the "OnVisible" section? I'm assuming here this is adding a column called "ManagerName" with the value of the Manager's DisplayName, and the criteria is that the director's email is the same user logged in, correct?

[WarrenBelz]

@galos ,

Your assumption is correct on the content - the code will output a Text value, so it will be wherever you had the code you posted that had the error.

Please click Accept as solution if my post helped you solve your issue. This will help others find it more readily. It also closes the item. If the content was useful in other ways, please consider giving it Thumbs Up.

MVP (Business Applications)   Visit my blog Practical Power Apps

[galos]

@WarrenBelz,

OK, I originally had that other code in the manager's pulldown menu, so when I replaced it with yours, I only see "i:0#f|membership|....."  in the combo-box.

In this use case, would it be possible that when Jim logs in, instead of having him select a VP each time, and then selecting his name, could it know that he's logged in and automatically select the VP (his boss) in the VP dropdown, then autoselect his name in the Director box, and all that is left for Jim to do is select only the Manager's he has supervision over? (not displaying any others)?

Thanks again (and sorry if I'm not conveying this properly!)

[galos]

@WarrenBelz 

I am attempting to use your code for VP as following:

VP

Sort(
   Distinct(
      Table1,
      VP
   ).Result,
   Result
)

but it's drawing an incompatible type error. When I changed VP to VP.DisplayName it worked, however, when I got to the Director pulldown:

Sort(
   Distinct(
      Filter(
         Table1,
         VP = YourVPCombo.Selected.Result
      ),
      Director
   ).Result,
   Result
)

this is giving me an error saying "Incompatible types for comparison. These types can't be compared: Record, Text".  I tried changing Director to Director.DisplayName also, but it's the same error. Also, should YourVPCombo.Selected.Result be YourVPCombo.SelectedItems instead?

Thanks again!

[WarrenBelz]

@galos ,

I assume now that all your fields are Person Fields - is there any reason for this in a reference list ? If you made them Text and all of this would be much simpler, however I have updated the code to allow for this. The value you are after for the VP would be

LookUp(
   AddColumns(
      Table1, 
      "VPName",
      VP.DisplayName
   ),
   VP.Email = User().Email
).VPName

Please click Accept as solution if my post helped you solve your issue. This will help others find it more readily. It also closes the item. If the content was useful in other ways, please consider giving it Thumbs Up.

MVP (Business Applications)   Visit my blog Practical Power Apps

[WarrenBelz]

@galos ,

Amended code in my earlier post covers this as noted earlier. Also please take a few minutes to understand the logic - that will allow you to apply it all the way down. Lastly ask yourself do you really need People columns if you are just storing a name or email - they will compound your frustrations more than this going forward.