No way to have custom string format?

[rampart]

From my digging around, it seems the set of formats of columns of type Text, e.g. Email, Phone, URL etc. is baked into Dataverse. I would like to be able to create custom formats, for example using a format mask, but this seems impossible - it all seems to go back to this class , which is simply a pseudo enum, which I assume triggers some hard-coded logic.

This is rather a pain, and seems to fly in the face of dataverse's professed openness and flexibility. For the small library catalog I am developing, I already need two custom formats - ISBNs and RGBA colors.

Is there a way to do this? Am I missing something? Or is there a way we can have this in Power Apps?

[rampart]

There is a featur request for this here: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Ideas/Text-Formats-for-Data-Entry/idi-p/172003.

If you agree, please upvote this.

[timl]

Hi @rampart 

What type of app are you building? If it's a model driven app, you can use the input mask control. There are some more details my post here.

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Power-Apps/Input-Mask-Custom-Control-on-Model-Driven-Ap...

[SeanHenderson]

Hi @rampart 

Is this for a Model-driven app? There might be a way to do it using JavaScript. What are you trying to do specifically?

[rampart]

Thanks all. I'm using a model-driven app. I'll check out @timl's post. I would really prefer to have my mask enforced in dataverse, though...

[EricRegnier · Accepted solution]

Hi @rampart,

The link that @timl is the method to do it out-of-the-box with Dataverse model-driven apps. But this is only front-end and will not be enforced from the server-side (API or database), same thing with JavaScript. It is possible to enforce it server-side but you'll have to revert to coding with plugins: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/data-platform/plug-ins

You can write a plugin that executes real-time (sync) on create or update of a record and validates the input. If it's not correct, the plugin should throw an InvalidPluginExecutionException with a message explaining to the user the input format is invalid.

Hope this helps...