Help using Office365Users

[dhalpin]

Hello all,

After typing a long-winded question, I was able to distill it down.  Please see below the asterisks for further details if you like.

I have a collection which contains Office365User information for a sub-set of employees in a column called "OutlookInfo", pulled from a Sharepoint List (type: People).  How can I select people using a dropdown, preferably using DisplayName?  collection.'OutlookInfo'._______________ does not return any auto-complete suggestions.

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I am making a Project Management app for my team.  I would like to allow the user of the app to choose Project Leads from a dropdown menu.  The list of individuals on this list would be very small - maybe 10 people.  Then each Project Lead will have their own dashboard showing projects which have been assigned to them. 

Because I was/am confounded by the Office365Users concept, my initial solution was to create a Sharepoint List which is manually populated with the columns "Name" (type: text), and "Outlook Info" (type: Person).  The Outlook Info is not used anywhere else, but I added it to the SP list in the hopes I could leverage that information in the future.  The future is now 😉

So, in PowerApps, I have the following for OnVisible:

ClearCollect(projectLeads, (Sort('Project Leads',SortingOrder,Ascending)))

Then the dropdown pulls from the collection: projectLeads.Name.  That works great for the purpose of the dropdowns, but now I am making the separate dashboards for each Project Lead and I realize I cannot filter by Office365Users.MyProfile().DisplayName because the dropdowns use a manually-entered text field which might be misspelled or otherwise different from the official employee record.  This is my current (non-functional) filter for showing a person's projects on their dashboard's dropdown:

Distinct(Filter('Active Project List', 'Project Lead'= Office365Users.MyProfile().DisplayName), 'Collection Name')

So, I think my issue could be solved if I could populate the dropdowns with Office365Users.DisplayName (which is contained in the collection, but I don't know how to access nested tables' values). 

[dhalpin]

We are getting there!  So when you say, "The plan is (in App #1), that you have a Dropdown with the formula of the Items set to: 'Project Leads'.  You display the column of Name"  That formula would just be = 'Project Leads'.Name  right? 

Using that formula, it seems to display properly in the dropdown, but then patching the project list's Lead column (person type) throws an error.  PA will not allow me to choose 'OutlookInfo' if the formula is Lead:dropdown.Selected.___  I am only given the option to use Name, as displayed in the dropdown.

"the type of this argument 'OutlookInfo' does not match the expected type 'Record'.  Found type 'Error'

dh

[RandyHayes]

@dhalpin 

As mentioned in my last reply, your formula for the dropdown items should be : 'Project Leads' if you append that with .Name, then you will be stripping out all of the additional information you need (i.e. OutlookInfo) That is why you only see Name as an option.