Search Multiple Data Sources

[Alex-W]

Is it possible to do a search across multiple data sources connected to an app?

My organization has many SharePoint Online sites and each of these sites has a contacts lists for the team the site is assigned to.  We have one app that is connected to all the contact lists and it enables users to click on links to view the various lists in a gallery.  This works great, but I have a request from a user to add a search to the app that allows him to search for a contact if he does not know what team the person he is looking for is on.  Is this possible?  

[RandyHayes · Accepted solution]

@Alex-W 

Yes, this is certainly possible in PowerApps.

Example:

Ungroup(
    Table(
        {Items: Search(list1, text, "fields")},
        {Items: Search(list2, text, "fields")},
        {Items: Search(list3, text, "fields")}
    ),
    "Items"
)

The above will provide searches across multiple sources assuming the schemas are somewhat common.

You could use Filter instead of search, or pretty much whatever you need.

I hope this is helpful for you.

[Alex-W]

@RandyHayes 

Thank you for the quick response!  I know a thing or two about Power Apps but I am far from being an expert.  Can you explain how to use that ungroup function?  Where do I put it?

[RandyHayes]

@Alex-W 

That would be in your Items property for your Gallery.  Assuming that you are displaying your search results in a Gallery.

[Alex-W]

@RandyHayes 

I got it to work!  I just need to fix the formatting for the gallery.  Thanks for the help on this!!

For anyone else that has a similar issue and not that great at developing apps, in addition needing a gallery for this, you will need a text input field.  This is where users will type in whatever it is they are searching for.  The name of this field will come before the word "text" in Randy's ungroup function that he provided earlier.  So for example, I named my text input field, "TextSearch1".  To make this work in Randy's function, replace "text" with TextSearch1.Text.

List and fields should be easy to figure out, but this is name of list you want to include in the search and field is the name of the list column you want the search to look at.