Dynamically build QR Code and send to Email

[ClayCollins]

Hello,

I am looking to dynamically generate a QR Code and send it to an email. Most of it works except when using special characters in one of the fields used to generate the QR Code. I have an Image and set the Image property to:

"http://quickchart.io/qr?text=Customer: " & varRecord.Customer & "|Site Name: " & varRecord.SiteName & "|Street Address: " & varRecord.StreetAddress & "|City: " & varRecord.City & "|State: " & varRecord.State & "|Manufacturer: " & varRecord.Manufacturer & "|Model: " & varRecord.Model & "|Serial: " & varRecord.Serial & "|Unit Name: " & varRecord.UnitName & "|Unit Location: " & varRecord.UnitLocation & "|Duty Type: " & varRecord.DutyType & "|Refrig Type: " & varRecord.RefrigerantType & "|Circuit 1 Lb: " & varRecord.Circuit1ChargeLb & "|Circuit 1 Oz: " & varRecord.Circuit1ChargeOz & "|Circuit 2 Lb: " & varRecord.Circuit2ChargeLb & "|Circuit 2 Oz: " & varRecord.Circuit2ChargeOz & "|Circuit 3 Lb: " & varRecord.Circuit3ChargeLb & "|Circuit 3 Oz: " & varRecord.Circuit3ChargeOz& "|Circuit 4 Lb: " & varRecord.Circuit4ChargeLb & "|Circuit 4 Oz: " & varRecord.Circuit4ChargeOz & "&ecLevel=M" & "&margin=0" 

And the code for sending the email is as follows:

Office365Outlook.SendEmailV2(
User().Email,
"QR Code for: " & varRecord.Customer & " | Serial: " & varRecord.Serial & " | Unit: " & varRecord.UnitName,
"<img src='" & imgQRCodeGenerated.Image & "'> <br>" &
"<table>
<tr>
<th>Description</th>
<th>Details</th>
</tr>
"&Concat(
colQrGenCol,
$"<tr>
<td>{Key}</td>
<td>{KeyValue}</td>
</tr>
")&"
</table>"
);
Notify("Email Sent to: " & User().Email)

This is a customer that didn't have special characters in their name: 

This is a customer that had special characters in their name:

(I tried to paste a picture here like the other pic but it wouldn't let me, so I attached it to this post)

[v-xiaochen-msft]

Hi @ClayCollins,

Could you try the function EncodeUrl?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/power-fx/reference/function-encode-decode

Best Regards,

Wearsky

[ClayCollins]

Hello @v-xiaochen-msft ,

Yes, I've been working on testing that out this morning since seeing your response, but it doesn't seem to be resolving the issue. Setting the imgQRCodeGenerated.Image property to EncodeURL(...[url mentioned earlier]...) makes it so that the Image no longer generates a QR code. 

I'm thinking the solution will involve parsing through each character and when it comes across a character that will break the HTML, it will escape it. But I'm not sure how to do that with PowerApps. 

In Python, you'd do a for loop something like below:

def fix_html(line):
    result = []
        for each_char in line:
            if each_char == chr(39😞
                result += each_char.replace(chr(39), chr(34) + chr(39))  # This appends a double quote in front of the single quote to escape the single quote
            else:
        result.append(each_char)
    return ''.join(result)  # This combines the characters at the end into a string

How do I accomplish this in PowerApps? Or is this the approach I'm looking for?

[ClayCollins]

I tried to edit this earlier but was having issues doing so. Hopefully this time it loads. 

def fix_html(line):
    result = []
        for each_char in line:
            if each_char == chr(39):
                result += each_char.replace(chr(39), chr(34) + chr(39))  # This appends a double quote in front of the single quote to escape the single quote
            else:
        result.append(each_char)
    return ''.join(result)  # This combines the characters at the end into a string

[ClayCollins · Accepted solution]

I finally found the solution (at least as an interim) was to reject special characters that break the QR code generation. This doesn't parse through each character and escape it, as I'd originally proposed. But it still provided a solution to keep the QR code from being broken by stripping the special char from the text when saving the data to the record:

DataCard.Update = Concat(Split(txtCustomer.Text,""), If( IsMatch(Value, "([A-Za-z0-9 .-_])" ), Value ))

I got this idea, in part, from https://blog.atwork.at/post/Tips-for-PowerApps-10-RegEx who got it from it from https://www.iammancat.dev/2022/03/remove-characters-from-strings-using-regex-in-power-apps/

[ClayCollins]

Another attribution was to Shane Young's video on building dynamic QR codes, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzqPjZY1j7Y

It got me started in the building process, but the base64 part later in the video didn't work for me. Which is why I ended up having to utilize the solution I showed above. 

Thanks @iAm_ManCat and @ShaneYoung