Powerapps Patch vs Form (with attachment)

[whereswallyx3]

Having a challenge with Patch to Sharepoint vs New entry via form. Scenario is:

2 Sharepoint lists:

1. List of Student Volunteer Activities with activity type, name of teacher responsible and email of teacher responsible.

2. List of student submitted activity and status of approval.

Concept - Workflow is Student submits the volunteer activity by selecting from a combo box of all the possible activities from the SP List 1. This populates via lookup the teacher field and teacher email field. They click on submit and this patches the data to List 2. This way if the teacher responsible changes - then we can just update the SP List 1.

List 2 is connected to a PowerAutomate flow that sends the data for approval to the teacher email and the teacher can approve or reject and then the flow updates the entry in the SP List 2 with the status.

So in effect SP List has a fixed list of say 50 activities. SP List 2 could end up with 100's of entries depending upon how many students submit.

Works a treat - until staff asked if we could somehow include an attachment upon submission as evidence of the activity. Eg volunteer certificate etc.

So - as it seems I CAN'T simply tweak the patch to include an attachment.

I CAN do a form that allows them to create a new record and fill all the fields in manually and add an attachment. But they could pick the wrong teacher or get their email wrong.

What I would like is the best of both worlds - the form with the attachment where they can still search for an activity in the Activity name field (not just free text entry) that once selected looks up the staff member email from the SP List 1 and fills that data in the SP List 2 for the Flow to kick off.

Any idea of this is possible. From looking it appears a Form cannot connect to 2 data sources. So I am a bit stuck. 

Many thanks in advance.

Craig

[EddieE]

@whereswallyx3 

You can use you Patch in combo with Flow to add attachments to a SharePoint List, if that's what you are asking?

You can do something like this (pseudocode):

Set( vRecordID, Patch( ... your patch goes here ) ).ID

then

AddAttachmentFlow.Run( ... include vRecordID here ...)

Shane Young has a video on how get the Attachment control form a Form, adjust it, then set it up for use in a Flow

[whereswallyx3 · Accepted solution]

Eddie - many thanks for the feedback - sorry for the delay in response (Easter break).

Ultimately I managed to get it work after all - using the form with the attachment column.

So - because I am using a form - the attachment field works as expected - so that is great. On submit it sends the attachments to the Sharepoint list. So I stuck with trying to work out if I could get my data sources in the form to come from 2 different lists - and it turns out YOU CAN have 2 (or more) data sources in a Form.

Stumbled across the fact that once you allow the insert form menu item to do its thing - it will insert the form with the fields you choose from the Sharepoint list you pick first (the default list) and a default name like "DataCardXXX" for each field. Each Datacard then normally has a text label named after the field - called DataCardKeyXXX... and a text box to input the data into the new form - DatacardValueXXX.

If you change nothing -  when you look at the properties of the Datacard - under advanced there will be an Update section with something like - DataCardValue16_2.Text - so in this case - for my comment field - on update / submission of the form - the Comment DataCard will submit the value you type into the box to the connected Sharepoint list.

What I wanted was the ability to have a dropdown list pull data from another Sharepoint list and lookup some other values based on the dropdown selection to populate other fields that would then be submitted to the main SP list. 

To do this - select the data card in question - click on advanced properties and then unlock it - and then delete the input box. With the data card still highlighted - insert a new input option - eg a combobox I called cbName and set the items property to whatever SP list you like to look up - eg activities.name (activities is my SP list and name is the column I wanted to pull back in the drop down).

You then need to update the "update" property of the datacard to match the new input field you have added - so in my case - it was changed to cbName.Selected.name.

Lastly - there will be a couple of red error icons when you do this that relate to properties of the card that reference the original "datacardxxx" name of the input box - eg Height / Width etc. Click on them to edit them in the formula bar and you will see the names underlined with the old field names. Change these to the new input fields you have chosen - eg cbName and it should be good to go.

The best bit is that Looksup also work - so based on the Name of the activity selected from the Dropdown above _ I can populate other info specific to that activity by having the text label in say that supervising teacher section set to:

LookUp(Activities,cbName.Selected.Title=Title,field_3)

So based on the activity the student picks - the teacher name now comes down into this field and the student does not need to select it. 

Note one weird thing - see how it says field 3 - this is the correct teacher name column in my Activities list. I originally put in the name of the column - "teacher" and it works - no errors - but when I save and go back in - it seems to revert the index number of the column - but still works. Can anyone explain why that happens?

Anyway - I now have a fully working solution using a form to submit data to a SP list with attachments where the input options within the form (dropdown / lookup / text boxes) come from another list.

Cheers