Make text inputs unique to use it later in a different form

[Anonymous]

Hello nice people! I am very noob in Powerapps and English isn't my first language so kindly bear with me if I can't articulate my problem properly. I am working on Canvas. I have very big data source (list)  which is basically rows and rows of questions and these questions are classified under different types( for example type 1 has 30 questions, type 2 has 12 questions etc) . Then, I've inserted a dropdown for user input so that they can select the type of question they want to answer.  Finally  I have inserted a gallery and used filter logic to filter out the questions of a particular type. So far so good. But the user will answer the questions and unfortunately , as far as I know, gallery can't store or update data in data source. I need a form to do that. But to make a form out of my data source, I needed the questions to be column by column instead of row after row. This isn't feasible because that I can't use the filter logic anymore and also, there are tens of thousands of questions so transposing them isn't an option either. 
What I came up with is , I will create an extra list of just the answers and create a form based on that data source. This form won't be visible to users. They will input their answer in gallery and I will use set function to relay those answers to form datacards. Is this possible? My main problem is, all the answers in gallery are shown as textinput1. So I can't assign different answers to different datacards. How can I make these textinput unique so that I can use them in formula of SET function. Thanks. 

[Silvester]

Hello @Anonymous ,
Let me suggest this.
Since your questions are in rows and you can't apply a form on it, you can make use of the IDs, naturally every row has a particular ID right?
In your gallery, the user can only answer one question at a time. Meaning next to your Dropdrown(where the user select the question), the TextInput field will be visible and the user can answer in the context of the question selected. You can have a button like Reply or Answer that is visible alongside the text input field. Whenever the user clicks on that button, the answer goes to your 2nd List you created for the answers.
You could have a field like ParentID which refers to the ID of the row or the question been answered for tracking, then you will have your answer field next to it.

[Anonymous]

@Silvester , Thank you for your kind response. I appreciate it. I still have a few confusions left maybe because I am new to Powerapps. I will point those confusion down below--  1. First of all, users don't select any particular question. Rather they select the type of the question. Say, an user may select type 1, while other select type 2. Each of this type has a bunch of questions ( ranging from 10-50) User  select a type and then answer all the questions from that type. and I used the distinct function to only show questions from a specific type after user input their type in the dropdown. In this context, how does a particular ID of a row works? will it meddle with my previously used distinct function(in user dropdown) ? How do I put this particular ID? just add an extra column in data source and numbering it?  Again, I am very thankful 

[Silvester]

Good! So the row ID already exists in SharePoint maybe not visible on your view. you can unhide it. 
Once a user selects a type, I believe you have a gallery or a table to display all questions from that type. And to make it easy, they user need to answer question by question for this to work effectively. Once the user selects a question from the gallery, we will set the selected question to a variable (VarQ) :

Set(VarQ,ThisItem)

Now VarQ is a record that have these various attributes (ID, Type...)
On your Reply or Answer button, you can patch to the second SP List 

Patch(SPList2,Defaults(SPList2),{ParentID: VarQ.ID, Type: VarQ.Type, Answer: Textinput1.Text}); Reset(Textinput)

[Anonymous]

Hi @Silvester , your solution worked wonderfully. Thanks for the suggestion. May I ask your help a bit further? What if I want to store answers of different 'type' of questions in different list. say, 'Type 1' questions' answers will be stored in SPList2fortype1, 'Type 2' questions answers will be stored in SPlist2fortype2. How can I make that happen? Can I use a variable as the list name in the patch code and set the variable to have different values depending on users input? or is there any other solution?

[Silvester · Accepted solution]

Hello @Anonymous ,
Sorry for the delay in the respond, weekends are often busy at my end.
So, you just need to insert an "if" statement in the code.
Let's assume SP1 is the list for Type1 Questions and SP2 is the list for Type2 Questions...

If(Dropdown.selected.Value="Type1",Set(varList,SP1),Set(VarList,SP2));Patch(VarList,Defaults(VarList),{ParentID: VarQ.ID, Type: VarQ.Type, Answer: Textinput1.Text}); Reset(Textinput)

[Silvester · Accepted solution]

Hello @Anonymous ,
Any feedback?