Massively Frustrating and Useless!!!!

[BenFrustration]

I have no idea how you dare to suggest that this whole PowerApps / Flows / Sharepoint business is in anyway user friendly enough for any user to use.  I am a database developer for a living, and I can't get any of it to work.  It's a complete and utter joke!

All I want to do is create a PowerApp page with a button that uploads a local file to OneDrive.  There are zero templates offering this very simple concept, and when I try to build it from scratch it asks for completely undefined parameters and there are absolutely no instructions or useful information anywhere to be found.  You have developed all these little seperate interconnecting programs, that only serve to make everything that much more inconvenient.  Please Help!  Please design something I can use!  

[masisley]

Hi @BenFrustration,

Sorry you're having a difficult time with the product.

Where is the source of the local file? Will it be on your PC, or on the device running the PowerApp? Presumably the latter. Here are a few templates that hopefully will help. They're not quite what you're looking for, but may give you a few ideas:

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/galleries/public/templates/1f4a2b1b99e64e8dbb81b7c47cc5bb11/upload-...

https://preview.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/galleries/public/templates/679554ecb78f4e5fa8d4eea205c28440...

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/galleries/public/templates/d2f34ae0dfa011e6b070f5b13cd24608/copy-ne...

Hope that helps.

Mark

[Anonymous]

Agreed, have read twenty or so pages all stating how easy PowerApps are to use and set up. 

I have not found a single page showing you how to do anything other than connect a data source. Its one button. 

No where have I found documentation suggesting how to manipluate your data, converting a template to actual data or how to edit the templates using your own data. 

Another great idea from Microsoft, that wont last the year due to lack of support, documentation and utterly clueless sales pitches. Sad. 

[leyburn19]

I am not a DB designer nor have I any education in IT.  I am self taught.  I totally challenge the negative of this discussion.  I have built many apps in powerapps for my teams to use.  I have created some very fancy flows that tell users they have ovedue tasks,  or there are things that must be done now or archives data.  I have both products plus SharePoint integrating extremely well.  I set and forget and everything just happen in accordance with the time line I want.

While I do agree there can me be more help,  but I isolate this to my  knowledge on the conditions and formulas.  Everything else is pretty well Monkey see, Monkey do.  That said every google search and these forums all got me fixed. There are some excellent videos by some power users on youtube and I have noted MS are providing enhancements every day. 

Flow with powerapps or SharePoint is brilliant so I assume here to stay

[dalepmay]

Agreed. But it's even worse than you said. I have a very small SharePoint List. The very first column is named 'Site'. According to PowerApps, 'Site' is an invalid column name. This is just 1 example, I've seen this same issue trying to reference column names all over PowerApps. If M$ was smart they would have made PowerApps use SQL statements, but nope.

[leyburn19]

When a list is created in Sharepoint the first column is normalyy named Title by default so you should refrence title in powerapps.  If you put a number in the name of the column it often gets an odata reference in the title.

So there are two ways to get the actual name that powerapps uses.  One is to look in the HTML address bar aty the end of teh address when editing the column.  2 is simply drill down through all the field names when you referenc the list in something like a gallery.  EG:

Create a gallery on a form.  Bind it to the list.  Then put a text box in one of the gallery rows and in the text line put ThisItem.  now you will see only the options that are allowed to be attached to teh ThisItem.  Run through them and you will get all the field names (except ones like lookups etc as these are not used in galleries)

Another way would be to make a collecion on teh list and scroll through teh columns to look at teh names.  EG.  ClearCollect(Mylist,Listname)

[ehalsey]

@leyburn19 that is awesome!  I was specifically wondering how your users determine whether or not a Flow worked or what it's current state is?  I've not found an easy and reliable way for a typical user to see where a Flow is at any given time for a given SharePoint item.  In the past our workflows had a status column in SharePoint the user could click and see the status along with any log to history/status messages the developer added to the WF.

[DevelopAlways]

You probably don't find it frustrating because you're not a developer. The fact that there is no way to upload a file (other than a dozen responses about uploading images which is useless if you want to upload DOCUMENTS) is extremely frustrating. What's even more frustrating is the lack of care from Microsoft about providing features that are really needed for this to be a useful development platform, such as USER DEFINED FUNCTIONS!

[leyburn19]

There is no file explorer capability to select a file and upload unless you base it on a form.  So here lies a posiible work around.  Create a simple one column sharepoint list.  Connect to your app.  You can now build a form that only shows the attachemnt option.  this allows a user  to select files.  Given the ID of this will allways be 1 you can now runs a process that:

1. submits the form to save the attachments

2. runs a flow to get attachments and do whatever you wanted to do (eg: email to someone) then the flow removes the  attachments so your powerapps view will look ready to do it all again

I have not tried this but I think it will work, but I guess I am a non developer who thinks that a developer somewhere thought as a user and gave them a tool to try.  

[gdavis53]

I must concur.  We have a massive number of Infopath/SharePoint applications.  We need to rewite them in PowerApps since InfoPath is being depreciated in 2026.  The main job of these apps is to collect files from the field.  PowerApps can't seem to do this. There are Flows that will upload a file from the local drive, but require a hard coded password instead of taking the current user's credientials.  How useless is that?  How am I supposed to release an app to lots of users with these restrictions? I may have to actually write something that needs to be installed on over 250 people's PCs, just to upload a file.

Yes, the PowerApps team have released an attachment control, but limited to 10 meg, which is useless.  They were worried about performance.  Can kinda see why since Flow took over 30 minutes to post a 42 meg file and this was from a network PC, not a phone.  What did they write Flows in, COBOL?  Lucky for us, real time performance is not that big a deal, so we can live with it.  However, not everyone would be in our situation.  

I've been spending the last 2 days writing a web service wrapper around Flow to post a file to SharePoint from PowerApps. Everything works except getting PowerApps to load anything but an image to pass to the service.  I may be able to somehow pass the file using the attachment control, but I don't know at this point.  This situation is crazy.

Otherwise, I'm supportive of the effort as InfoPath has its own issues.  However, InfoPath actually works and if we have to can write .Net code.  Please, please, please remove the restriction on file upload and provide a way to create our own user defined function.

[DevelopAlways]

How about not having the capability for user defined functions!!!!!! I have been going crazy trying to debug giant if statements with over 200 lines of code. This is rediculous!

How about a crappy editor that is so poorly performing, I could write a better editor in Javascript...

How about not being about to globally change the name of a variable without changing each instance...

How about not having screens as a namespace so that controls are not global but have context within each screen....

Shall I continue? MICROSOFT ISN'T LISTENING!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ChemaMateos]

It´s a immature environment: too much bugs/workarounds, ignore many simply needs, not easy to replicate between environments...

It lookslike very easy and "pretty", but when you really begin to work in it ... is a mess.

Only useful to very small things, not for real production enviroments.

It´s free, that is true.

[DevelopAlways]

It's not free. Maybe if you use it on your own, but if you deploy it to others where you are using multiple connections, multiple flows, multiple custom connections, multiple environments, it costs. And without those integrations, it's a toy.

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@ChemaMateos wrote:

It´s a immature environment: too much bugs/workarounds, ignore many simply needs, not easy to replicate between environments...

It lookslike very easy and "pretty", but when you really begin to work in it ... is a mess.

Only useful to very small things, not for real production enviroments.

It´s free, that is true.

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[leyburn19]

Wow! I must be on a different planet. I have over 40 Apps running operationaly with very littly issues to resolve. These include Site Management (Staff, ETime Sheet, Purchase Reqs etc), Audit Tool, Customer Feed Back, CRM, Booking and equipment management, Staff Qualifications Management, Distribution, retail back ordering and it goes on.
A lot of these apps were built for another contract I was working on. I have not been with that for 8 months and the apps are all continuing to do as intended with no failures
To me this software, plus Flow, has made my operational world so much more productive. It is superior to Access, gives more flexibility and is easy to design in. The ideas to improve business are flowing from all areas in the business as everyone starts to see what can be done.
There is a world of good videos to assist on YouTube and there is a great community freely giving support every day. I like the idea I can build effective tools in next to no time and then easily modify it as the ideas flow back from the teams. I have wishes in its development, but I can see it becoming more powerful every day. I guess my real concern is where its licensing will go and teh current trend to addon being based on premium content.

I happily do all my development with the Office 365 E3 license and there are indications new developments will not flow into the app with that level of license. I hope that is not the case as it would completely destroy Customer MS relationship. When you have 5000 employees in a company with 90% having E3 and then only a small percentage of them using this functionality, a company quickly looks at what value is delivered and will move to make savings, particularly if new enhancement are not included and only designed to get more money. The warning bells are there for this product and flow.

[DevelopAlways]

Nobody is questioning the idea of having this type of platform. It has it's place in delivering the UI portion of an application that seemlessly integrates components of O365 in a secure manner very rapidly. But MS needs to stop focusing on the breadth of the solution and focus on depth. The editor is way below par. I've been a developer for 40 years and from a developers prospective, I'd rather have a non-browser based editor that performs better, allows me to look at all the code much more efficiently (the variable use list on the File tab is a joke), and has a consistent undo/redo capability. We've asked for a much easier file upload paradigm for the past 4 years (not to mention the maximum file upload of 10 meg, a joke), user defined functions or macros to reduce the amount of duplicated code - also affecting the maintainability and reduce debugging time, and my biggest complaint is data sources not showing the actual state of the data. You update a SQL table, as an example, and you have to set up a timer to do a refresh to get the data source to be in sync with the data. Give me a break!!!!!!

[MartenVosmer]

Please review Shareflex, if your challenges are to complex for Nintex and the Microsoft Power platform.

https://lialis.com/shareflexbusinessapp/

[asssssssssssss]

Totally agree, Flow only can do some basic things, not modular, cannot disable/enable an activity, simple requirement becomes over-complicated by using flow, not for developers to use, neither for regular users, I gave up and quit Office 365, and now working on ServiceNow, hundreds times better for a real developer 

[Json1982]

Power apps is a complete joke.   All controls are global, which makes naming conventions incredibly difficult. (Not to mention everything is loaded into memory all the time).

Gallery rendering is extremely slow for even a handful of records. 

Custom connectors seem to have absolutely no consistency on there definitions.  I have 2 endpoints with the exact same definitions passing a post request via the body. One for some reason requires me to add each property of a record individually, and the other doesn't. 

Out of the box functionality that should exist doesn't.  An example I have is simply determining the OS being android or iOS.  Which makes the launch function absolutely useless, since they work differently on each OS. 

There is absolutely no way to create reusable code.

There is absolutely out of the box way way to create universal layouts (like css).

There is no way to debug. There is no collaboration allowing multiple developers to work on different aspects of the app at the same time.

Nested if statement are an nightmare.

The list goes on and on.  Microsoft blew it hard on this one by trying to build a no code solution to mobile devopement that requires massive amounts complicated code that is almost impossible to read to even function correctly.  

[jorge2021]

Hi there:

I think you are using it wrongly.  PowerApps and Power Automate are two services to create fast application, and not full-fledged ones.   Are both service perfects? No way but they are (more or less) usable.

If you are creating an application with more than one developer then you are doing it wrong.  PowerApps is for fast applications, nothing more, a couple of hours, a day, or max a week and that's it.  

[poweractivate]

@BenFrustration 

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All I want to do is create a PowerApp page with a button that uploads a local file to OneDrive.  There are zero templates offering this very simple concept

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I know it has been some time, but was curious in case you still wanted to know of a template or example for your scenario regarding a button that uploads a local file to OneDrive. Or did one of the templates from @masisley  already help you as a starting point regarding your concern here?