Help populating text box based on value of drop down

[WirralGuy]

Sorry I am a newbie when it comes to this but I have a table called Vehicles 

In the table there are 3 columns

Vehicle 

Length

Width 

I want a text box to be populated with the dimensions associated to the Vehicle i.e. if I selected a BMW I want it to pull through 9ft by 6ft in the appropriate Length & Width boxes but If I choose Mini it will come through as 5ft x 3ft.

I also want the option for users to manually type over the dimensions if required. 

Appreciate this is fairly straightforward but struggling to see how to go about it.

Thanks in advance. 

[CarlosFigueira]

You can use a couple of text input controls, and set their Default property to the selected vehicle.

For example, if you display your vehicles in a data table (whose Items property is set to the name of your table), then you can have a couple of text inputs with the following properties:

txtLength.Default: DataTable1.Selected.Length & "ft"
txtWidth.Default: DataTable1.Selected.Width & "ft"

When the user selects a different vehicle, the default value will be changed and the text input values will be updated. But the user can still override those values.

The attached app has those formulas so you can see them "live".

[WirralGuy]

Thanks so much for this - the data resides in a table on onedrive "table9".

I have a generic dropdown above which people can pick their vehicle from however can't seem to get them to talk to each other.

I tried:

table9.Selected.Length & "ft"

however not sure how to work a statement which basically says 

"If current Vehicle is selected BMW then populate Length with info from Table9 based on that vehicles length & width"

[Mike8]

Hello WirralGuy,

Let's try to do what Carlos said.
You have a dropdown that people can pick their vehicle.
I don't know its name so I will refer to it as Dropdown1.

Now you can create two textinput controls. Let's call them TextInput1 and TextInput2.
Go to the Default property of TextInput1 and write this expression..
Dropdown1.Selected.Length & "ft" (here it's Dropdown1 but maybe in your app the dropdown has a different name. Replace Dropdown1 with the name of the dropdown that displays the vehicles. The same applies for TextIput1 and TextInput2)

Go to the Default property of TextInput2 and write this expression..
Dropdown1.Selected.Width & "ft"

Now try to pick a vehicle. As Carlos said "When the user selects a different vehicle, the default value will be changed and the text input values will be updated. But the user can still override those values."

Let me know if you need more help.

[WirralGuy]

Hi Mike8

Thanks for your reply.

I know i'm being thick here but can't get this to work. Ideally, I don't want to add a data table in the APP but I have created one to see if I can get it working 

How do I get the initial drop down to read from the new data table and therefore can be picked in the drop down list?

[Mike8]

Hello,

The dropdown control has a property called items. You can set your source there.
Unfortunately i can't understand your issue. Which is the old and which is the new data table?
If you have a table called Vehicles, set
Dropdown1.Items = Vehicles
and you can see the dropdown filled by the data from a column of Vehicles table

[WirralGuy]

I've attached some screenshots which will hopefully illustrate my challenge.

I have a table in onedrive  (table9) with the vehicle and then the associated length & width of the vehicle.

On PowerApps I have a drop down which looks up the vehicle name from Table9 "Distinct(Table9,Vehicles)" which users could choose an existing vehicle from and by selecting that it will pre populate the dimensions below however if they don't pick a vehicle then they can type their own dimensions in.

[Mike8]

Hello,

Nice.. 🙂
I think it helps to understand the concept.
On your first post you wrote,

"I want a text box to be populated with the dimensions associated to the Vehicle i.e. if I selected a BMW I want it to pull through 9ft by 6ft in the appropriate Length & Width boxes but If I choose Mini it will come through as 5ft x 3ft.

I also want the option for users to manually type over the dimensions if required."
Is this solved? Did you manage to apply what Carlos suggested? If not, what is the issue?

On one of your next posts you wrote:
"How do I get the initial drop down to read from the new data table and therefore can be picked in the drop down list?"
Is this the issue that you are trying to resolve?

On your last post:
"if they don't pick a vehicle then they can type their own dimensions in."
If you use a dropdown the dropdown has always a default value. If you don't set one it has the first value as default. So, a vehicle is selected even the user didn't select any.

[WirralGuy]

What Carlos suggested was for a selection from a datatable to be made, I really don't want to add a datatable, i'd much prefer to pull via the ondrive table (table9).

I can get the dropdown to look at table9 and pull through the vehicle options "BMW, Jag, Ford". I am having an issue trying to get the length and field associated with those vehicles to populate the dimension boxes below when one of the vehicles is selected from the drop down. 

[CarlosFigueira · Accepted solution]

You don't need to use a data table, that was an example that I had. Take a look at the new attached app. Just like you can use the Selected property of the data table to access the entire object, you can also access the Selected property of the dropdown, and you'll get all properties of the selected object, not only the vehicle name.

And I'm not sure if that's what you need, but the attached app also plays with the DisplayMode property of the text input controls - if the user selects one of the vehicles then they are not editable, but if it selects the "empty" vehicle in the dropdown then they can be edited. If this is not what you want (i.e., you always want to let the user have an option to edit the dimensions), then you can change that property to 'DisplayMode.Edit' in the text input controls.