In this video, Paul and Ashlee Culmsee are using Flow to enhance PowerApps.
Imagine a company where service technicians perform on-site repair of equipment. Inevitably, in doing this sort of work, the technician will need to refer to equipment drawings, service history, past photos, specifications and/or operating manuals. These days PowerApps is fast-becoming a great option for such a scenario because many field workers prefer to use their phone or a tablet. But PowerApps also has some limitations, and right now that is around the display of documents from SharePoint. For a start, it is impossible to display office documents natively in PowerApps at this time, and there are authentication-related issues in certain circumstances when pulling content from SharePoint.
But fear not… with a 6-step flow, it is possible to solve this problem. This flow allows a remote user to securely request a document from SharePoint, but importantly, converts that document to a PDF on the fly.
There are two big benefits from this:
- A reduction in time and effort for document controllers. If a document frequently changes, it is most likely in word, excel or PowerPoint format. They do not have to worry about converting it to PDF.
- It allows the document to be viewed in PowerApps natively (As a result of #2, on top of some Flow kung-fu, we will learn some PowerApp tricks in this article too :-).
watch?v=zTyqEEc9-FI
