Working with rows in table that have the same content

[ha_wai]

Hi there,

I seem a bit lost...

I have an ever growing SP list and need to extract some records from it, identify those that have one field with the same content and then tally up the content of another column of those records.

Long version:

The SP list contains data relating to patient transfers to and from various hospitals. Those patients are accompanied by staff members (nurses +/- doctors). For every staff member a start and end time is recorded (plus a few other time points that are not relevant to my current problem). The list is organised so that every transport is one record. So far so simple.

What I need to do is extract the records where the transport started within the last 72h. And then tally how much time individual staff members were involved in transports in that time period. The goal is to generate a bar chart with a single bar for each staff member to show how much time they have spent on transports.

First step in the item property of the chart properly identifies the relevant records:

Filter(retrievaldata, dpt_TPWO >= DateAdd(Now(),-72,Hours)

This gives me a table containing all the relevant records.

Because the staff members come from a choice column I added a new column to the table. I also added a column that calculates the duration of the transport:

AddColumns(Filter(retrievaldata, dpt_TPWO >= DateAdd(Now(),-72,Hours)), "Duration", DateDiff(dpt_TPWO,arv_TPWO,Minutes),"Doctor", ThisRecord.doc.Value)

The new column "Doctor" now contains the selected value of the choice column.

Now my problem starts: how do I add the "Duration" values for each individual in the "Doctor" column. The choice field in the SP list contains around 30 individuals of which in any given 72h period 2-4 might have been working.

Further to that is there an elegant way to trim down the amount of data that needs to be dragged around? The SP list has currently 57 columns of which I only need 6 for this specific problem.

Apologies in advance if this is a bit confusing, but it clearly represent my current state of mind.

Cheers

Hansjoerg

[Drrickryp · Accepted solution]

@ha_wai 

You are working with a non-normalized table and will continue to have problems. It also appears to contain several one-to-many relationships within a single table.   Please review my blog series starting with the overview to see how to properly construct the lists you want to use for your app.  https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Community-Blog/Database-Design-Fundamentals-and-Power... .  To me, it seems that you will require a minimum of 5 tables (lists) to describe your data and the relationships around each transport.  A single Hospitals table can be used as a lookup for both source and destination. 

[ha_wai]

@Drrickryp 

Yes that would have been smart to have done it that way from the beginning. Sadly it is a bit too late to change the whole project.

The whole thing was a quick and obviously rather dirty solution that nevertheless does what it was intended to do: provide a record for every transport done by our teams.

The above mentioned question is an afterthought that was raised by the users doing the tasking. There was the question if it would be possible to get an overview how much time team members have spent on transports recently to quickly identify potentially fatigued staff and avoid sending them on the next transport.

So the original question stands. Is it possible to do this with the current structure? If so, how? And if not, that is also fine and we have to look for another way of achieving the goal, even if it is a piece of paper or a note attached to the roster.

[jaeiow]

More on this: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Platform-Integrations/Dataflow-errors-with-Alternate-Keys-...

[jaeiow]

If you do go the route of splitting these tables up, I think that I have found an easier solution. Unpivot in power query the attribute columns and load into dataverse tables using a dataflow. You can then create those views in the same tables that are filters of a table using the unpivotted data to filter on. 

[ha_wai]

Thanks everybody for the help.

I don't plan to untangle the mess and simply accept that there is no easy fix to this one. If it continues to be requested I'll have our Power Platform specialists here sort it.

Is there a way to close a topic without solution?

[jaeiow]

Power Query is fairly intuitive, with the transformations you can achieve. There is a forum section for for this, but you might find that you don't get a response here: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Query/bd-p/PA_PowerQuery  because content is crossposted from Power BI. I personally find that data transformation of your individual case as described by @Drrickryp would be achieved in Power Query. Also, that is probably the comment you should mark as solution. It is a good solution for knowing about relationships and appropriating it to an environment or tools (Sharepoint or Dataverse, in this case).

[Drrickryp]

@jaeiow and @ha_wai 

This post is a good example of why going through the process of normalizing data before building your app is a best practice.  If the back end design is flawed, it is likely that the app will not work properly. 

[ha_wai]

@Drrickryp 

I couldn't agree more. Doing things right from the start is always the best way of doing things.

In this case I made a lot of stupid beginners mistakes, but fixing them now isn't worth the effort. This is just a side show for me anyway and I'm happy that it does the job it was supposed to do. The nice to haves are exactly that.

But nevertheless thanks again for the time you spend trying to show me the path to enlightenment 🙂