Group The Items In A Power Apps Gallery

Organizing a list of items into groups makes their meaning easier to understand. The simplest example of this is a calendar. First we see the date (group) and then we see all of the events on that day (items). But in a Power Apps gallery we can only show a list. So how can we accomplish making groups in a gallery instead?

In this article I will show how to group the items in a Power Apps gallery.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Daily Appointments App
Setup the SharePoint List
Show The List Of Appointments Inside A Gallery
Create A Collection Of Daily Appointments (Group Items)
Make A List Of Unique Appointment Dates (Group Headers)
Combine Group Headers And Group Items Into A Single Collection
Sort The Combined Collection Into Groups
Change The Gallery Datasource To The Grouped Collection
Update Gallery Formatting To Display Groups

Introduction: The Daily Appointments App

Estimators at a home renovations company use the daily appointments app to keep track of all their meetings with customers. Appointments are displayed in ascending order and are grouped by the appointment date.

Setup the SharePoint List

Create a SharePoint list called Daily Appointments to hold all of the meetings with the following columns:

• StartDateOnly (date only)
• StartDateTime (date & time)
• FullName (single-line text)
• StreetAddress (single-line text)

Load the SharePoint list with this data:

Show The List Of Appointments Inside A Gallery

We will begin by adding a list of appointments to the app. Open Power Apps Studio and create a new mobile app from blank. Add a connection to the Daily Appointments SharePoint list. Then insert a gallery into the screen and select Daily Appointments as the datasource.

Change the Fill property of the Appointments Screen to gray. This step defines the fill of the group headings.

RGBA(237, 237, 237, 1)

Then update the following properties of the gallery to these values.

TemplatePadding: 0
TemplateSize: 90

To show appointment data in the gallery make 3 new labels, position them as shown below…

…and use this code in the text property of the name, address and time labels respectively.

ThisItem.FullName

ThisItem.StreetAddress

Text(ThisItem.StartDateTime, ShortTime)

Finally, create a separator by placing a label on the screen and give it these properties.

Height: 1
X: 0
Y: Parent.TemplateHeight-Self.Height
Width: 1

Create A Collection Of Daily Appointments (Group Items)

We will group the gallery items by loading the Daily Appointments list into a collection and performing several data transformation techniques. The code to do this is quite lengthy so we will look at each code block one-by-one to understand what it is doing.

Create a new button and position it on top of the titlebar. This temporary button will be used to test the code we are writing and will be deleted before we publish the app.

Write this code inside the OnSelect property of the button.

// Create a collection with all daily appointments
ClearCollect(
    colDailyAppointments,
    AddColumns(
        ShowColumns(
           'Daily Appointments',
            "FullName",
            "StartDateOnly",
            "StartDateTime",
            "StreetAddress"
        ),
        "Level",
        2
    )
);

When we click the button it generates a collection of daily appointments in ascending order. The level column is added to track whether the row is a gallery heading [1] or a gallery item [2]. Its purpose will become more apparent soon.

Make A List Of Unique Appointment Dates (Group Headers)

Next we will determine the list of unique appointment dates to create our grouped gallery’s headers. Add the following code to the OnSelect property of the button. We use the DISTINCT function to remove any duplicate dates from StartDateOnly. The output of DISTINCT is always a single-column table with the column name “Result”. We rename this column back to StartDateOnly add a new column called “Level” to define each date as a gallery grouping header.

// Create a collection of all daily appointments
ClearCollect(
    colDailyAppointments,
    AddColumns(
        ShowColumns(
           'Daily Appointments',
            "FullName",
            "StartDateOnly",
            "StartDateTime",
            "StreetAddress"
        ),
        "Level",
        2
    )
);
//// *** NEW CODE ****
// Create a collection of all unique startdateonly values
 ClearCollect(
     colUniqueDates,
     AddColumns(
         RenameColumns(
             Distinct(
                 'Daily Appointments',
                 StartDateOnly
             ),
             "Result",
             "StartDateOnly"
         ).StartDateOnly,
         "Level",
         1
     )
 );

When we click the button the resulting collection for colUniqueDate looks like this.

Combine Group Headers And Group Items Into A Single Collection

The next section of code is quite simple. We create a single collection called colCombinedAppointments to combine the group headers and group items into one table

// Create a collection of all daily appointments
ClearCollect(
    colDailyAppointments,
    AddColumns(
        ShowColumns(
           'Daily Appointments',
            "FullName",
            "StartDateOnly",
            "StartDateTime",
            "StreetAddress"
        ),
        "Level",
        2
    )
);
// Create a collection of all unique startdateonly values
 ClearCollect(
     colUniqueDates,
     AddColumns(
         RenameColumns(
             Distinct(
                 'Daily Appointments',
                 StartDateOnly
             ),
             "Result",
             "StartDateOnly"
         ).StartDateOnly,
         "Level",
         1
     )
 );
//// *** NEW CODE ****
// Combine both collections into a single collection
ClearCollect(
    colCombinedAppointments,
    colDailyAppointments,
    colUniqueDates
);

Press the button to preview colCombinedAppointments.

Sort The Combined Collection Into Groups

The last step is to sort the combined collection so that group headers appear above group items. We can accomplish this with help from the “Level” column we’ve been adding to each collection. Recall that a grouping heading has a value of 1 and a group item has a value of 2.

// Create a collection of all daily appointments
ClearCollect(
    colDailyAppointments,
    AddColumns(
        ShowColumns(
           'Daily Appointments',
            "FullName",
            "StartDateOnly",
            "StartDateTime",
            "StreetAddress"
        ),
        "Level",
        2
    )
);
// Create a collection of all unique startdateonly values
 ClearCollect(
     colUniqueDates,
     AddColumns(
         RenameColumns(
             Distinct(
                 'Daily Appointments',
                 StartDateOnly
             ),
             "Result",
             "StartDateOnly"
         ).StartDateOnly,
         "Level",
         1
     )
 );
// Combine both collections into a single collection
ClearCollect(
    colCombinedAppointments,
    colDailyAppointments,
    colUniqueDates
);
//// *** NEW CODE ****
// Sort the combined collection
ClearCollect(
    colSortedAppointments,
    SortByColumns(
        colCombinedAppointments,
        "StartDateOnly",
        "StartDateTime",
        "Level"
    )
);

Click the button to review colSortedAppointments. Our gallery data is now grouped by the appointment date!

Change The Gallery Datasource To The Grouped Collection

Now that the data is prepared we will load the colSortedAppointments collection into the gallery

Use this code in the Items property of the gallery

colSortedAppointments

Update Gallery Formatting To Display Groups

We must update the gallery’s formatting to make it appear as though the appointments are grouped.

Select the Street Address label and apply this code to the Text property. It will now show the date for any gallery rows that are a group header and it will display the Street Address for any rows that are a group item.

If(
    ThisItem.Level=1,
    Text(ThisItem.StartDateOnly, "mmmm d"),
    ThisItem.StreetAddress
)

Group headers text should be larger than group items text to create a visual hierarchy.

Use this code in the Size property of the Street Address label to update the text size.

If(ThisItem.Level=1, 18, 14)

Then we will change the background color of the group headings to make the hierarchy even more clear.

Write this code in the TemplateFill property of the gallery to change the fill for group headings to Transparent and the fill for group items to white.

If(ThisItem.Level=1, Transparent, White)

The final step is to remove the orange button which we used for testing and move its code into the OnVisible property of the screen. That’s it, we’re done creating our grouped gallery in Power Apps!

Questions?

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