Power Apps Host Object – Get Web Browser And O/S Details

The Power Apps host object allows us to get a session ID, the operating system, the user-agent or the tenant ID. It helps us understand the current hardware and environment the app is running in. This is very useful information to have when diagnosing Power Apps errors. In this article I will show you how to use the Power Apps host object.

Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Report A Bug Screen
• Setup The SharePoint List
• Create A New Bug Report Screen
• Determine The BrowserUserAgent
• Check The Operating System
• Get-The-Power-Apps-Session-ID
• Obtain The Tenant ID
• Submit The Bug Report To The SharePoint List

Introduction: The Report A Bug Screen

Users of an app can go to the “Report An App Bug” screen to report an issue to the developer. The bug report includes details about the browser user agent, the operating system, the Power Apps session ID and the tenant ID.

Setup The SharePoint List

Create a new SharePoint list with the following columns:

• BugDescription (multiple lines of text)
• BrowserUserAgent (single line text)
• OS (single line text)
• SessionID (single line text)
• TenantID (single line text)
  
  

Create A New Bug Report Screen

Open Power Apps Studio and create a new canvas app from blank. Add rectangle to the top of the screen to make a titlebar. Add a label with the text “Report An App Bug” and also insert a bug icon.

Insert a new label with the words Tell Us What Went Wrong and a text input to capture a description of the bug.

Determine The BrowserUserAgent

The browser user agent contains information about the web browser being used to run the app. We can use this User Agent parsing tool to understand what the text string means.

Add a bold label with the words BrowserUserAgent to the app and another label where the value will be shown.

Use this code in the Text property of the label the determine BrowserUserAgent.

Host.BrowserUserAgent

Check The Operating System

Power Apps can be run on many different operating systems including Windows, iOS, Android, and more. It is valuable to know the operating system because Power Apps can have different behavior on each one. To find which operating system is in use add a bold label with the title OS and then insert another label below it to show the value.

Write this code in the Text property of the label to show the operating system.

Host.OSType

Get The Power Apps Session ID

The Power Apps session ID is useful when reporting errors because it can be passed to Microsoft in a help ticket. Microsoft has the ability to view telemetry and see exactly what went wrong.

Place a bold label with the text Session ID onto the screen and create another label below it to store the value.

Use this code in the Text property of the label to get the Power Apps Session ID.

Host.SessionID

Obtain The Tenant ID

The final piece of information we can grab from the Host object is the tenant id where the app is located. Add a bold label to the screen with the text Tenant ID and create another label below it to store the value.

Write this code in the Text property of the label to display the Session ID value.

Host.TenantID

Submit The Bug Report To The SharePoint List

Once the user has written the bug report the they press a submit button to write the form data to the SharePoint list. Go to the Power Apps Data menu and add the Bug Reports SharePoint list.

Insert a new button at the bottom of the screen with the text “Submit”.

Then use this code in the OnSelect property of the button to submit the bug report. The app will display a success message upon submission or an error message if there is some problem.

If(
    IsError(
        Patch(
            'Bug Reports',
            Defaults('Bug Reports'),
            {
                IssueDescription: txt_IssueDescription,
                BrowserUserAgent: lbl_BrowserUserAgentValue,
                OperatingSystem: lbl_OSValue,
                SessionID: lbl_SessionIDValue,
                TenantID: lbl_TenantIDValue
            }
        )
    ),
    Notify("Error: Bug could not be reported to the app developer"),
    Notify("Success: Bug was reported to the app developer")
)

Questions?

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