Adding Extra input fields per user's wish

[Anonymous]

I have a form which has some fields such as title, department, category and details. I want for each category to have a datepicker and a number infront of it. for example the categories list has 4 option: 1-email 2-phone 3-skype 4-fax. so the user can input per day the number of hours that used each of the category's option. Each title may take a long time and user will be using each of the available categories several times on differents day. How is possible to do so in powerapps? I am not sure how i can do this adding part. for example in one title the user in 3 days used phone and 2 days skype. 

I hope I explained clearly :). 

Thank you, 

Fatemah. 

[Drrickryp]

Hi Fatemah,

I believe that it is possible to do this with Powerapps but it is more complicated that you may think. The most important step is designing your database. It seems to me, you have four tables (or lists in Sharepoint, spreadsheets in Excel, etc) of data with one-to-many relationships between each table.  One table would be Users, the second Titles (This sounds like projects to me), the third Categories and the fourth, Date/Time.  So each user in a department could have many Titles, each title could have several categories and each category could have many date/times. The  Users table would have three columns: ID, Username, and Department. The Titles table would have four columns: ID, UserID, CategoryID, Title. The Categories table would have two columns: ID and Category, and the DateTime table would have five columns: ID, TitleID, DateTimeStart, DateTimeEnd and Details. Let me know if this is correct and I will continue on to show how you can set up the gallerys and forms to collect the data.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Drrickryp

Thank you so much for replying :D. 

I give you more detail on my problem. I have attached my initial form with it's excel. (Form1, Form1DB)

Each Employee can sumbit so many cases. Each case can have so many categories. And Each Category can have different days and Number of hours. As you suggested I made the four excel tables. I have attached them. So is it possibel to do so? 

[Drrickryp]

I am pretty sure that you can achieve what you wish but the underlying database will need to be properly designed. Does the attachment below pretty much define the table entitites and the relationships?  It assumes that each case can have multiple employees working on it and that each customer can have multiple cases.  In this example, the key database tables are the Cases and DateTime.  The other tables are LookUp tables.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Drrickryp, 

yeah thats all. The perpose of this from is that to let your manager know about the work you have done in details. I think the Customer can be one of the entities of the case table as well. Or we can keep it both ways works with me. 

[Drrickryp · Accepted solution]

Hi Fatemah,

I worked on your project and I tested my solution using some dummy data and as a result, I have some suggestions so you can avoid some of the pitfalls I encountered.   I changed the spreadsheets a bit and have a new diagram of the project tables in relationships.png.  First, in excel before connecting the tables to Powerapps, make sure that your ID fields are all numeric integers.  Also make sure the Start and Stop fields in the timeclock sheet are formatted as dates. Let Powerapps create a new app using the TimeClock sheet.  It will create 3 screens, I have examples of the BrowseScreen and the DetailScreen showing data.  It seems my browser is limited to 3 attachements so I will continue this post for the next three.

[Drrickryp · Accepted solution]

The + icon on the browsedata screen navigates to the dataentry screen. The attachments show the same data entry screen but with different buttons and labels shown or hidden using UpContext() variables.. Each Dropdown is loaded from one of the tables.  The Cases dropdown is filtered by the Customers dropdown. 

[Drrickryp · Accepted solution]

The last attachment shows a typical edit screen with the Customers table as the datasource and the item property being a lookup to the dropdown box next to it.  Lookup(Customers,ID=DropdownCustomers.Selected.ID).  By using tables linked by Primary and Foreign keys, you should be able to achieve maximum flexibility in designing detail screens that could be copied or sent via email. I hope this shows that what you wanted to do with Powerapps should be possible.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Drrickryp, 

thank you so much for your solution. I will try it and let you know how did it go. 

Thank you, 

Kind Regards, 

Fatemah.