People picker behavior

[Lisa_T]

I have a form with a non-required people picker field. If the user types in the name, then clicks away from the field without making a selection, the name remains, but the entry is not satisfied. This is evident when the save occurs, and the field is saved empty. I need to make this user proof. How can I capture that a selection was not made but still allow an empty field if nothing is entered?

Note: This is only an issue if they click away from the field, if they hit enter, or tab, the drop down appears and tries to resolve. I am trying to account for human behavior where the user does what you don't want them to do.

Thank you

[v-qiaqi-msft]

Hi @Lisa_T,

Do you want to save the user input within the search text bar to the Person column?

Could you please tell me that if you want to notify users when they do what you don't want them to do?

Actually, if you want to save the search text back to a Person column, I am afraid there is no way to achieve this.

For that a Person column has its special data format as below:

{
Claims: "<Type Your SP Group Email Address Here>",
Department: "",
DisplayName: "<Type your SP Group Name Here>",
Email: "<Type Your SP Group Email Address Here>",
JobTitle: "",
Picture: ""
}

Once you input something that does not match with user in SharePoint group, we could not save this input. Power Apps does not support this.

Unless you make this people picker field as a Single-line-of-text column, so that you could save the search text if there is no matched result.

[Lisa_T]

Qi,

Thank you for your response. I am looking for a way to notify the user that a valid person must be selected. If they enter a name without completing the selection, I would like to notify them that they have not yet satisfied the entry. Is this possible?

Thank you!

[SebS]

To submit Button, add code:

IF(IsBlank("ControlName".Selected.Result),Notify("Text Here",Error),SubmitForm("FormName"))

Make sure You put right names of Control and Form, also it maybe Selected.Result or Selected.Value depend how You populate Person Picker

[Lisa_T]

@SebS Thank you - however, this is allowed to be blank. The behavior I want to capture is if they type a name but clicked away without performing the search and selecting a name. This makes them believe they have populated the field, but since the search was not completed, it does not preserve the entry. 

[SebS]

@Lisa_T 

The only thing what coming to my mind is:

If(!IsBlank("ControlName".SearchText) && IsBlank("ControlName".Selected.Result),Notify("Text Here",Error),SubmitForm("FormName"))

But I'm not sure if it actually works, I did not test it 🙂

[v-qiaqi-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Lisa_T,

Make sure that you have populate the Combo Box with a Person column using the Choices() function.

To notify user to select from Combo Box and allow them select nothing, please set the OnSelect property as below:

If(IsBlank(ComboBox1.Selected)&&!IsBlank(ComboBox1.SearchText),Notify("Valid user must be selected!",Error),SubmitForm(Form1))

Just refer to ComboBox1.Selected if you set the Items property with Choices() function or Office365users.SearchUser()