Detect SPO list item create/update if done from outside

[Anonymous]

Hello,

How to detect if SPO list's item created/updated from outside PowerApps?

We want to warn users if they do so, because it is not possible to prevent users to make edits directly or from other tools.

--

Regards,

Ankit Shah

L&T, India

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous 

You can do this with Power Automate / MS Flow. I do something like this on one of my SP List where if someone removes an item, I get a notification email. You can build the Flow to suit you needs in this regard.

[Anonymous]

Hi, @Anonymous 

But how to tell flow that it was deleted/created/modified from out of PowerApp?

[WarrenBelz]

Hi @Anonymous ,

****UPDATE - I was preparing the below while you were corresponding with @Anonymous - both options should be considered ****
On new records, one approach would be to have a true/false flag in a hidden SharePoint field and either Patch or Default it to true (hide it on the form) in Power Apps. You could then have a warning label on the screen with the Visible property 

!ThisItem.YourFlagFieldName

so it would not be visible if the field was true.
Updates are a bit more problematic however one approach might be to have a shadow date field and write Now() to it as above every time a change is made. Then the Visible on the label would be

Not(
   Text(
      ThisItem.YourShadowDate,ShortDate
   ) = Text(
      ThisItem.Modified,ShortDate
   )
)

There will be a Delegation issues on both the Not and the Date comparison. As I could not avoid the Date, I left them both in.
Further on your issue of amendment by other means, I have several SharePoint reference lists in a sub-site that is nowhere in the site navigation display, so the user would have to know the sub-site and list names to find them.

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[Anonymous]

@Anonymous 

You could add a few extra columns to capture this. You could setup columns called

'CreatedBy', 'LastModifiedBy' and 'DeletedBy'

Then if any of the above are performed using your app you just Patch a comment to the respective column like 'PowerApps'.

eg

User creates record inside your App, include as part of the Patch 

{..., CreatedBy: "PowerApps", ...}

Do the same for modified and deleted.

Then you have a record of what gets done inside the App and all other processes must then occur outside the app. So, you can then flag to the app user that if the column/s contain "PowerApps" it has been done by the app, otherwise not by the app.

Flow could also filter these columns using the same criteria to find records with "PowerApps".

[Anonymous]

@WarrenBelz 

Thanks.

Regarding your answer...

1) Creation of item: Yes, It is possible using default true/false boolean column. But what if user modified the same boolean column at the time of creating the item directly from SPO web view?

2) Modification of item: Yes, Use of Not(ModifiedDate=ShadowDate(Now())) helps distinguish. But I have tested if for example ShadowDate's Now() is 10/06/2020 10:00:00 AM then ModifiedDate is 10/06/2020 10:00:01 AM, The delay of One Second in date causes incorrect result.

--

Ankit

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous Thanks.

But if those extra columns are modified in such a way matching my app logic, then it will be incorrect.

--

Ankit Shah

L&T, India

[WarrenBelz]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Firstly anything here is a workaround and the system was never designed to manage this.

The web view should not make any difference on the second option - you are looking at the modified date when the user loaded the record compared with a Lookup of the current modified date.

With the seconds, you could use 

DateDiff(
   ThisItem.Modified,
   Lookup(etc),
   Minutes
)>0.1

to manage this small discrepancy.

Please click Accept as solution if my post helped you solve your issue. This will help others find it more readily. It also closes the item. If the content was useful in other ways, please consider giving it Thumbs Up.

[WarrenBelz]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Just checking if you got the result you were looking for on this thread. Happy to help further if not.

Please click Accept as solution if my post helped you solve your issue. This will help others find it more readily. It also closes the item. If the content was useful in other ways, please consider giving it Thumbs Up.

[Anonymous]

@WarrenBelz Thank you for asking me.

Right now I have created a flow which duplicates record in isolated datasource when a record is created/modified/deleted with ID & timestamp of original data source record.

Let's see what further we can do with this....