Using ComboBox to store more than one Textvalue in Excelfield

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone.

I am currently building a application in which people can create and edit items stored in a Maintable of our company excelsheet.

Depending on the project it will have different "practice" meaning the expertise required. A project can have more than one "practice". Therefore, I thought I would use the ComboBox so that the person who inserts the information will be able to choose 0, 1 or more than 1 practices as can be seen below:

The problem is that it will only show the latest chosen in the DetailView and the excelsheets field:

My apologies if this is a basic question. Simply haven't found a way to do it.

[Anonymous]

Bump

[Anonymous]

If anyone would be able to help I would be really happy. I feel like I have tried everything and that the solution should be quite simple..

I am basically trying to make sure that when I go back to editform it will remember the chosen values such as - "if(Editform1.Mode = FormMode.Edit, Parent.Default, "") - Which I use when I use dropdowns.

With the following formulas in different properties of the Combobox itself and the comboboxCard:

UPDATE PROPERTY COMBOBOXCARD:    Concat(ComboBoxTechPartners.SelectedItems, TechPartners, ",")
ITEMS PROPERTY:    TechPartnerSPM.'Tech Partner(s)'

I have tried this, but it gives me the error "Invalid argument type (Text). Expecting a table value instead.":

If(EditForm1.Mode = FormMode.Edit,RenameColumns(Split(Parent.Default, ","),"Result", "TechPartners"), "")

With this one ";" is the Issue, I have similarly tried with "&", "," etc. none of them work. The error gives: "We expect an operator such as +, *, & at this point in the formula":

RenameColumns(Split(Parent.Default, ","),"Result", "TechPartners"); If(EditForm1.Mode = FormMode.Edit, Parent.Default," ")

RenameColumns(Split(Parent.Default, ","),"Result", "TechPartners") & If(EditForm1.Mode = FormMode.Edit, Parent.Default," ")

[Anonymous]

@v-yutliu-msft @CarlosFigueira 

Any chance you can help me out regarding this? I am stuck

[CarlosFigueira · Accepted solution]

I'll walk through the entire process that I used to build an app similar to your scenario; try to follow along, and in the way hopefully you'll find out what you have to do different in your case.

First of all I have an Excel sheet with one table:

After saving that excel in a Dropbox folder, I used the "Start from your data" option to create an app based on the main table:

Now we have an app based on that list, but with a text input control to determine the practices:

Let's now change it to use a combo box control instead. We can go to the edit screen, select the data card for the practices (Practices_DataCard2), and unlock it so that we can add a new control to that card:

Once the card is unlocked, I can insert a new combo box control in it, and update its properties to the formulas below:

ComboBox1.Items: ["Sales Operation", "Digital Transformation", "Inc. Inovation", "Operational Excellence"]
ComboBox1.DefaultSelectedItems: If(EditForm1.Mode = FormMode.Edit, RenameColumns(Split(Parent.Default, ","), "Result", "Value"), Table())

At this point you should have a combo box that lists the practices from that record:

It's now time to start updating the formulas for the data card; the only one you'll need to update is the Update one, since it currently takes its value from the combo box, but you now need it from the combo box:

Practices_DataCard2.Update: Concat(ComboBox1.SelectedItems, Value, ",")

At this point the changes are done (you will need to remove the existing text input control, and possibly fix some reference errors that come with it too):

Hope this helps!

[Anonymous]

@CarlosFigueira 

You are amazing for having taken the time to do this for a dummy like me, thank you!!!

[cjbretts]

Thanks, Carlos. This was very helpful. I used elements from this to build a solution for me.

I am having an issue because for some reason my "DefaultSelectedItems" are not really appearing as marked items in my ComboBox. They are partially recognized and they appear in the "SelectedResults" output but they are not being selected/marked within the ComboBox and this can lead to the item being selected twice for example, and stored as duplicate... so in this example below I'll have to remove the already flagged option on top if wanted to mark the same category in the combobox dropdown.I have checked that both data source (Tbl) and the Items Choices (is a "ClearCollect(Distinct()") are stored with compatible settings (i.e. tables with "Value" as the name of the column). I tested multiple things and the issue appears to be with the Items property of the combobox. I tried changing the delimiters on the "DefaultSelectedVaues" part, using "trim" to ensure no odd characters are interfering. They only thing that worked was to play with the Items property.

I tested setting the Items values manually as ["Item 1","Item 2","Item 3"] and when doing that it worked fine. However, I do need this to work with items property being a collection of Distinct choices from a list of items:

ClearCollect(LicenceLabelChoices, (Distinct(tbl_LicenceLevels, TrimEnds(LicQua_Label))))

Would you have any recommendation?

[cjbretts]

Solved the problem using input from this other conversation:
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/ComboBox-default-selected-items-from-a-colle... 


The key was to put this "{Value: Value}" at the end of the DefaultSectectedItems property:

ForAll(Split(Parent.Default, ", "), {Value: Value})