General design question - planner / agenda app

[high-solutions]

Hello,

On this moment we are using an excel sheet as "planner for rooms and people/teams in ranges of a year" but with the data what needs to be managed its not really clear having 365 days downwards with items from column "B" til "CP" (70+ columns).

Now in the office 365 enviroment it would be great to have a "simple" planner/agenda app where a small team can manage this info.

So i made a mockup what I think it should look like but in designing the power app I'm running in to 2 main problems:

1. Scrolling:

I could use a Table because it scrolls horizontally and vertically. But the Edit-able factor of the table is not useful because you can't edit items like you can in a gallery (or excel).

I can make one or multiple gallery's with text fields, i like that. but than the gallary is always only 1 way scrolling so that's difficult if you have a lot of locations and teams you would like to manage in one view. Also you can't scroll multiple gallery's at the same time so keeping the same day&date on all tables wil be difficult with scrolling.

2. Datasource management:

I'm by far not an expert on this, and I would like to keep it simple, not only for me but for everyone using this app and our office 365 environment, so I would like to use a cloud based datasource like online excel tables, datapoint lists or dataverse.

I could imagine that every "agenda" gets its own datapoint list because they don't have al the same columns, but also I would like to have the option to create new agenda's, with AddColumn you can partly do this but as far as i know you can't create a new datapoint list from within a power app right?

Or should i create a list for every possible column and give the agenda's id's and patch every column in the agenda to different lists?

What would be a good way to store this kind of data?

But maybe i'm al thinking wrong and it would be nice if this is possible, 

I just don't know if it's feasible.

The Mockup:

[BCLS776]

To help with your app architecture, can I suggest you move away from the idea of creating endless columns as you can do in Excel? I've written a blog article on the topic because this comes up a lot. Instead, add a column to your data table that contains the date of your room bookings. Then, you can access the specific bookings associated with a specific date by performing a Filter() operation on the table of bookings. 

Hope that helps,

Bryan

[high-solutions]

Thanks for the response.

But i never planned to work with endless columns. But i can't figure out how to work with multiple agenda's with each their own "SubColumns" and the way the Powerapp Gallery’s work.

I could create one datasource for every agenda and put multiple gallary's next to each other, but then users could not add a new agenda them selves without editting the app (because as far as i know you can't add a new datasource from within the app)

It's important to see multiple agenda's next to each other (something the agenda from outlook is already not clear enough for multiple rooms and teams otherwise we would use just that).

So what would be the best way to create the view from the image?
It doesn't need to scroll upwards/downwards necessarily, but I need it to scroll side ways to see at least a few selected agenda's next to each other.

[BCLS776 · Accepted solution]

As you've hinted at, a gallery for form can only have one data source table in its items property. However, we can leverage Filter() and LookUp() to help us display the data we want and pull in related data from other tables where necessary.

I'm not super-clear on what an Agenda is, and how it relates to Locations, Contacts, and Dates. Can you spell out those relationships? For example, there may be multiple Agenda per user, and each Agenda relates to only one Location? And then each Location may have multiple Contacts and Dates? The better we understand how those relate, the more efficiently we can organize your data.

Consider this example of four tables and their associated columns. This one helps with visualizing the relationships I described above:

Agendas

ID

LocationID

Owner

Locations

ID

City

Venue

Capacity

Contacts

FirstName

LastName

WorkEmail

LocationID

Bookings

BookingDate

AgendaID

We could do a gallery with Bookings in its Items property, and Filter() that based on the BookingDate. Each row in the gallery will have a corresponding AgendaID, which can be used within a LookUp to pull in further info. For example, to get the LocationID, it would go something like LookUp(Agendas, ThisItem.AgendaID = ID, LocationID). The LocationID can be used to pull up further info, such as the City or a table of matching Contacts (which could fit into a nested gallery if you need it).

Make sense?

[high-solutions]

Hi and sorry for the (year long) no response but i didn't have the time.

but now i have a little time and I kinda went with your build up.

Productions and locations

ID

Title/Name

Type ("production" or "room" or "venue" or "team")

bookings

Id

Production and locations Id

Date

time

notes

possible travel time

possible transport

etc

etc

contacts

FirstName

LastName

WorkEmail

etc

etc

I used a gallery/container combo to keep some level synchronized scrolling for multiple agenda's.

it works kind of except that galleries don't show the empty dates so it keeps difficult to compare multiple "productions and locations".

I solved it for now by making a date gallery and LookUp every agenda with everydate but ofcourse this makes it slow when many agenda's are open. but it is do-able.

i'm now looking to reduce the LookUp's.

To make things more clear:

For me any agenda can be a person, team, production, room or location.

this really doesn't matter much because they are in the same list and i can filter those with a "type"(Text)column.

this way i can compare a "team" against a "venue" or all "venue"s or all "team"s in one and the same gallery with filters.