Real World PowerApps - How to view SharePoint PDF's in PowerApps (with some help from Flow) 06-06-2018 09:00 AM

[paul_culmsee]

In this video Daniela (citizen developer extroadinairre) and I outline an effective approach to a common use case of providing critical documents to field staff using PowerApps. It utilises Flow to retrieve PDF from a central SharePoint document library and we also show how to improve the user experience via some clever but less known PowerApps and SharePoint tricks

watch?v=s3PC7tqqoI4

[ThatAPIGuy]

This is super-awesome! mind-blowing!

[diegoadum]

Thanks for sharing this. Very good example of using PowerApps. My only note is about to use Flow. In a large organization with many users trying to get PDF info, how many times will be Flow called? this will affect, for sure,  the kind of license you should get to avoid Flow issues, right?

Regards,

Diego.

[Anonymous]

This was immensely helpful!  I was able to successfully set this up and display my PDFs, but when taking this one step further and exporting the PDF for the ultimate purpose of sending the PDF as an email attachment, I am wondering if there is a way to control the naming convention that is ultimately created for the PDF from the mobile device.  From what I understand, PowerApps does not yet have the ability for me to send a PDF from the PDF Viewer as an email attachment (if I'm wrong and this is another flow I need to build, please let me know!).  The workaround I am using is to export the PDF from the Viewer to a browser using the export feature, and then sending the PDF as an email from the browser.  The file name is automatically named "Invoke.pdf", and I think this may be coming from the file path in Azure (part of the file path includes the phrase "invoke").  Is there a way to assign the file name through the current flow or a new flow?

[SPChamp]

I am trying to get the same functionality for SharePoint list, Identifier is not returning the value like it return for Document library so I tried to construct the one similar as below however still the flow is throwing exception saying "Route did not match".

The Identifier for Document library = Shared%2bDocuments%252fAuditReport.pdf

The identifier for List = Lists%252fAudits%252f59_.000.

The identifier constructed = Audits%2FAttachments%2F59%2FAuditReport.pdf

Any thoughts ?

{
  "status": 400,
  "message": "Route did not match\r\nclientRequestId: 6ddd739e-c80d-41a5-bf7c-5a4f78f7f1a3\r\nserviceRequestId: b273d59e-a030-0000-377f-fb811e1fd58a"
}

EDIT

Found the solution.

I have a gallery which shows the list items. When user click the gallery item I am fetching the Attachments property and then executing the First() method on it to get the file identifier. Thsi identifier then passed to the Flow built as per above video. It is working just fine.

Now only problem is the action used in this Flow "HTTP request receiver" comes under paid license so need to check the cost on production for this.

[ThatAPIGuy]

I did a video using a different method and thought it might help. Check it out.

https://youtu.be/_NVU2jfG5Y8?t=27m25s

watch the video from around the 28th mintue 

Also the flow that I used is available here -

https://github.com/thatapiguy/Sharepoint-Docs-as-PDF-in-PowerApps-using-Flow

[SPChamp]

Looks good however the I guess the flow will take sometime to execute as it involves more steps in reading the content and then converting it etc. Also my PDFs are bit heavier hence need minimal action.

[dan_harner]

After doing these steps, how would you get the PDF's to revert back to their original state (top of the scroll bar) after someone selects off of the PDF? Sort of like a ResetPDF.

[testaccPA]

thanks, it works, but only with the 1st document ... why?

Update: has done

[Maexchen]

great (NOT), "response" is now a Premium connector 😡