Powerapps how to Vote on Likes for a Question

[Manny123]

Hi Team, I was wondering if you can help me?

I am very new to Powerapps - but I was wondering if it was possible to create an app which can allows multiple users to post questions and then allow team members to put a vote on the different questions (e.g. thumps up /Like counts)? Ideally would want the list of questions to be ordered based on the number of likes received.

I have created a basic Sharepoint list which captures Employee Name and Employee Questions.

Thanks, Manny.

[BCLS776]

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@Manny123 wrote:

Sorry also is there a way so a team member can only vote once per question? i.e. can only click on Thumps up like once per question.

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There are a few ways to do this, and all involve making the Patch available once to the user. You can limit them to one vote per app session by setting a true/false variable and making the Patch conditional on that variable. If you want them to have only one vote ever on that question, that might best be handled with a new table that records their votes against all questions. Then, lookup that table for an existing response before allowing them to patch a like a for a question. 

[Manny123]

HI how would the second option work? "only one vote ever on that question" Currently only have a sharepoint list. I ideally need a way to track that a user has already "liked" a question and therefore cannot Like the same question again.

[Manny123]

I have managed to get it to work. Users can now only vote once per question.  The issue I have now is how do I stop a question having a NEGATIVE number. I.e. people voting Thumps down only. Ideally "Likes" should only go to Zero and never to a negative number.  

[BCLS776]

To avoid negative numbers, put your Patch inside an If statement that checks to make sure the Likes value for that record is greater than zero before attempting to subtract one.

[Manny123]

Hi Thanks for all your help.

I am getting 2 delegation warnings for the app. 

1. When I am trying to get the total number of questions posted. - I am using the following formula: CountRows(Vote).  Is there another way to get total number of questions submitted, maybe using lookup?

2. I have search box and filter option so users can search on questions asked as well as users can search by "Questions Assigned To". I think because I am using "Or" it is causing delegation warning. Is there another way to write the same filter/sort?

SortByColumns(Filter([@Vote], StartsWith(Title,TextSearchBox1.Text) Or StartsWith('Question Assigned To',TextSearchBox1.Text) Or StartsWith('Post Question',TextSearchBox1.Text) ), "Likes", If(SortDescending1, Ascending,Descending))

[BCLS776]

Yes, CountRows (and many other functions) are not delegable, so they don't work well on larger data sets (more than 500-2000 items, depending on your SharePoint settings). If your list will never grow that large, you can safely ignore the warnings. 

If you do need to work with larger data sets, there are ways to load them into internal collections. Those aren't affected by delegation. Let us know if that's something you need to do for your solution. 

[Manny123]

Hi BCLS776,

I need the app to be super fast as many people will be going onto the app at the same time to either post a question or vote on a question. Do you think its better to just remove the issues with delegation warnings? ie. remove the total count on Questions and the search function?

Also I have noticed on the app the question textbox is a mandatory field if a user wants to post a question. when a user doesn't complete the question field and tries to click on submit - an error message pops up (which is correct). However on the form - the last question submitted gets displayed.

I was wondering if there is a way to only make the submit button visible once a user has updated the questions text field first? This would stop the issue I am currently having.

[BCLS776 · Accepted solution]

@Manny123, feel free to post some of these questions under separate threads to get more perspectives than mine. 

For performance, consider distilling your queries into two pieces: A delegable portion to create a collection in your app, then the rest can be done internally on the collection itself. See this link for info on what's delegable for a SharePoint list. Load only the columns you need from your data source, and keep in mind an If statement within a delegable function will generally render it non-delegable.

For your submit button, yes you can toggle the Visible property to make it appear/disappear, but also consider the DisplayMode property. Using DisplayMode, you can Disable the button so the user can see it (usually greyed out) so they know it exists, and then put it into DisplayMode.Edit when they satisfy condition(s). A suitable condition for your question text field might be: !IsBlank(QuestionBoxInput.Text), which checks to make sure something is in the question box before returning true.

Hope that helps,
Bryan

[zelga]

how did you manage it to work? can you share your App? 

I would be very thankful for that, thx.

[zelga]

Can you help me with the question how to manage it that you only can like or click the button once per user?

And how you sort your table by the digit of your numbers so that the highest is at top and so on.

Would be very thankful.