Prompting for a start and end data in a Power App linked to a flow...

[Anonymous]

Hi there...

I have a flow which is triggered from a power app (very simple, just a button on a screen). The button just starts the flow and the flow runs with a date range based on utcNow() and addDays(utcNow(),7). This coded date range works well for scheduled reporting, however in order to expand the usefulness of the app, I'd like to get the user to use a date picker to feed the start and end date data back to the flow.

I used to do this in MS Access a lot (way back) by simply adding a criteria [enter the date please... ] or similar into a field of a query.

There are built in date pickers though in Power Apps and it would be useful to push these dates into the flow.

Any tips on how to get this done. I'm thinking that the app will need to define the variable but cant see the way to push that into the flow.

Tony

[v-litu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

Please refer to the screenshot below to create your Flow and PowerApps:

You could create the Flow firstly, input two Compose action in it to accept the Start Date and End Date:

Then create the PowerApps, add the Flow into the "submit" button, then put the DatePicker1(Start Date) and DatePicker2(End Date) into the run() function:

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

So currently I have declared the date range within the "list shifts" process in the flow.

If I understand you correctly I create the variables for the dates with a specific name before the flow queries the shifts table.

I'm not sure how to do this and then get it fed back into the original query on the shifts data.

[v-litu-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

If you want to feed it back into the original query, the initialize variable should on the front of Shift action

Do you know how to set the expression of the button associated with Flow? You could refer to this document to learn how to do it:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/using-logic-flows

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

I've been playing some more with this. The dates from a powerapp cant be brought into a flow using array. string seems to be it.

I cant seem to get both the dates in though. I can if I pull one date but it isn't functional for the rest of the flow as the "teams" part needs utc format and time.

I have tried making a collection in the powerapp which captures the dates, but the format isn't usable.

I cannot do the flow.run in the app as the JSON() part doesn't like the dates that are in the collection.

I feel that I need to perhaps write the dates to a table elsewhere perhaps and then collect them in the flow from there.

This next issue is that excel online doesn't accept a formula in the cells in the tables needed, so cant convert the date like Monday 18th, May 2020 into utc style yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.fffZ which is what the flow needs.

I cant seem to find a way to convert on the fly into the collection with the right format which may solve the issue too even if it must be text, that can be converted to DateTime format.

If the initialise variable in the flow could accept the date as an array it would work, but only string seems to be a usable type.

[Anonymous]

I've also had a go at having the date pickers set their own global variables which works (as far as the dates are shown in the variables screen as long numbers)

These would need turning into the Flow friendly datetime format, but I cant get them to populate in the flow at this time.

I'm missing something needed to make them available to the flow now.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Just to close this off. I found the solution.

Ultimately I had to workaround the issue, by using a single variable sent from the app. It will do for now.

It seems that using an array of values from the app might not be workable for sending date/time information to the flow.

other data types send over just fine (ie manually adding text or numbers etc).

I'm sure I'm missing something, but I'll get into that issue as a separate project. Still learning.

flowname.Run() doesnt like two of the datepicker.selecteddate fields. More reading required.

Tony