multi-pages within one screen

[Anonymous]

Good day everyone, 

I have reached a bottleneck in my power app project at the current moment. Please do read what I am trying to achieve and tell me if it is even remotely possible with power app? If it is, how? 

Long story short, I am trying to build a education app for the company I working with right now. This canvas app will present courses that student users can take. Courses are a bundle of modules grouped together. Modules are a bundle of study materials that are supposed to be presented to the student user all together at once. The idea is that a course can have one or more modules. Meaning, I can have a course with 2 modules, another course with 3 modules...etc. 

What I want to achieve from this is that when the student user selects a course from the course catalog, the user should be prompt to a screen where I have the containers for the modules contents ready. The gallery loads the connection with the sharepoint folder that contains all the documents related to the specific module. the video player loads the link for the video from the moduleInfo list that I created for the module. 

If there is more than one module, the user should have a way to press a "Continue" button once he/she has finished viewing the content for the current module. But I don't know if that is possible with the circumstance of different course with different amount of modules. 

I would appreciate any kind of help, Thanks in advance to all of you who would read this question. 

[BCLS776 · Accepted solution]

Picturing your app's architecture, I think you're on the right path to use galleries to show courses & modules. Galleries adapt to show the correct number of items contained within your data source. Modules can be specific items within a gallery and could Navigate() to a screen set up specifically for displaying module contents. Perhaps the modules are supported with a Sharepoint List that contains much of their data and link(s) to videos or other external docs.

There should be no problem creating a Continue button that checks to see if there are further modules and if not, returns the user to a place to choose the next course. Once the user chooses their next course, a new set of modules populates the gallery.

Does that help?

[Anonymous]

That's exactly what I want to achieve, or at least, try to to achieve for the very least. So you suggest me to have modules as separate screens? Like perhaps instead of a progress bar that I was thinking about for the modules, I could maybe include a gallery for the formation itself? and everytime I press on one it navigates to another one while parsing the specific module information along with it so it uses the module templates and displays the correct information? 

[BCLS776 · Accepted solution]

No, I don't recommend putting modules each on a separate screen; instead, put in a gallery that contains your collection of modules and use the gallery's features to allow your users to navigate to their next or selected module. The module listing can be on one screen and the module "viewer" could be on another screen. That still makes it possible to create a progress bar and implement the navigation features you're considering.

[Anonymous]

I see what your point, that is very helpful and promising. I will check that now. However, I've got one last question. Another issue that has being bothering me is how should I store the module composition for each course? Right now the idea is to have a list with all course information and then a list with all the module information inside the sharepoint storage of my company. The module list is easy to prepare since all modules share the same structure. The course list, on the other hand, has variations like a course with one module, another course with 2 modules ...etc. what I want to achieve to somehow bridge these 2 list. I've got a few ideas in mind but I am not sure if it would end up working. For instance, I could perhaps create a new list for every formation, but that is going to make the sharepoint space a bit too messy. Please so share me your thoughts on this matter, thanks!

[BCLS776 · Accepted solution]

You'll know your data structure better than me but consider this as you set it up:

• Are modules a building block of the whole system? If so, they should be on their own list. Modules will have at least a many-to-one relationship with Courses, which can be referenced through a CourseID column in the Module table
• Courses will need a table to carry their attributes
• Chances are you need a Student table to keep track of those
• If Modules can be used in more than one course, then Modules have a many-to-many relationship with Courses and a third table (maybe CourseCompositions?) is a helpful way to convey these. This table would have a simple structure such as:

CourseID	ModuleID
A	1
A	2
A	3
B	2
B	4
B	5
B	6
C	5
C	7

This third table gives you the ability to look up which module(s) exist in each course.

You can extend these concepts further if you need to keep track of course enrollments, learning paths, etc.

It's simpler and more organized to have extra tables than it is to try to cram extra columns into one monstrous table. Your app will run better too. Depending on your module contents, it may work to have those within the table; however, don't be afraid to use external documents and store the links in the table. That may give you access to better media for learning.

Hope that helps!

[Anonymous]

That's exactly what I was missing for this part, thanks! Finally, another 'last' question, is there any recommendation on how should I create the courseIDs and the moduleIDs? considering course and modules are all going to be created in respective lists in sharepoint via the power app that I am building. Is there a way to make sure that IDs are generated automatically without the risk of redundancy, thanks again for you help, it was impressive. 

[BCLS776]

Sharepoint lists, by default, include an ID column that starts number at 1 and increases sequentially from there. That's probably the easiest solution, but if you need some special numbering then add in another column (don't mess with the built-in ID column) and use some example code from the community to look up the last value in the list and create the next increment.

Happy coding!