Revamping standard out-of-the-box controls in Power Apps has always fascinated me. Recently, there was a discussion about which control needs the most revamping to make it more customizable. I had no hesitation in mentioning the date picker control.
Even if you change the theme of the app, the colors change based on the theme but there is no way for you to specify custom controls, unlike for other controls like buttons, drop downs, labels, combo boxes etc.
Given these restrictions, I wanted to come up with a date picker that, at the minimum, allows me to pick whatever color I want and allows me to adjust the size (width and height) of the control, along with font size, font type and font color.
These are the properties of the date picker component:
- Input properties
- Main Color
- Secondary Color
- Header Font
- Header Width
- Header Height
- Text Font
- Output properties
- Selected Date
With this component, it is very easy to customize many properties of a date picker control, making it more in line with other controls.
These are a few examples of different versions of date picker controls created using the component by simply specifying the 6 above mentioned properties:
Other than providing the ability to customize the look and feel of the date picker control, the biggest outcome for me was getting rid of the need to click OK to select a date. That being said, this is definitely not the end, in fact, it's just the beginning of revamping the date picker control. There's a lot more that can be done with this, here are a few examples:
- Allow a range of dates to be selected
- Show more than 1 month at a time
- Typing in a year instead of navigating one month at a time
Here is a link to my blog describing the approach in detail. Hopefully you all like this and start using this in place of the standard out of the box date picker control!
Thanks,
Hardit Bhatia
