Date picker alternative

[wingers1290]

Hi all,

I need an alternative to the Date Picker because I'm using it for clients to specify their date of birth, and they don't understand that they can click the year to jump back and forth. Instead, they rapidly tab the previous month button... it's just not working.

I am now using three drop down boxes (day, month, and year) and passing this into the following function: 

DateValue(Concatenate(DateDay.Selected.Value, "/", DateMonth.Selected.Value, "/", DateYear.Selected.Value))

This works well, however, I am populating the days, months, and year values from SQL tables. I'd rather not rely on external queries for this data as it's having an impact on performance and in my experience the SQL queries themselves often return errors (using Azure elastic SQL server).

Does anyone know of how I can populate these values within the app? 1-31 for days, 1-12 for month, and 1900-2050 for years.

Without any iterative loop functions, I don't see any alternative except inputting these vaults manually... Any thoughts?

[Meneghino · Accepted solution]

Hi @wingers1290

There are two approaches I would consider:

1) Drop down boxes (as you suggest)

2) Text input with validation

Here is what I would do for 1)

a) Set the Items of the year drop down to:

[1900, 1901, 1902, ... 2049, 2050]

You can easily generate this in Excel with the Concat function.

I would also set the Default property of the year drop down to something like

Year(Today())

b) Set the Items property of the month drop down as follows and the Default property analogously to a)

[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]

c) Then I would finally set the Items propoerty of the day drop down to:

FirstN([1,2,3,...,30,31], Last(FirstN([31,
Day(DateAdd(Date(YearDropDown.Selected.Value, 3, 1), -1, Days)
, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31],  MonthDropDown.Selected.Value)).Value)

and again the Default similarly.

For 2) I have implemented it successfully using the OnChange property to parse the text input as a date and update a context variable that is used for the Default property of the text input itself.

Please let me know if you want more details

[wingers1290]

Thanks. Option one is the more cleaner in my opinion. I will try hard coding the values like you suggest instead of pulling them remotely.

The other thing I was considering is pulling all this data in a 'loading' screen at the start of the app, and passing it to a context variable that is then called whenever I need the date information. This would also solve the problem, but at the end of the day it will come down to performance. I will try to compare the two and see what happens.

[memsim1010]

Hey there, @Meneghino

I am having the same issue.  I followed your instructions but the formula for the day dropdown's items doesn't seem to be working for me.  I did make sure to change the Month and Year's dropdown field names to the ones used in my app.  Should I be populating all the days where you have '...' listed?

[Meneghino]

Hi @memsim1010, yes you should be populating the ...

You can do this easily in Excel using the Concat function without needed to type much.

[memsim1010]

Thank you @Meneghino

Not to be dense but, I did try this:

FirstN([01,02,03,04,05,06,07,08,09,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31], Last(FirstN([31,
Day(DateAdd(Date(Year.Selected.Value, 3, 1), -1, Days)
, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31],  Month.Selected.Value)).Value)

but it still doesn't seem to like it.

[Meneghino]

@memsim1010

have you propoerly used the name of the dropdowns for the year and the month?

In my example these were something like DropdownYear and DropdownMonth respectively

Are you receiving an error, or what is the issue?

[BeethovenMj]

For month picker Refer the link

https://beethovensway.blogspot.com/2021/02/month-picker-in-power-apps.html