Recently we posted about the enhancements that are being deployed in the 2022 Wave 1 release from Microsoft. One of those enhancements mentioned was the enhancements to the Power Apps grid control.
The read only version of the Power Apps grid control was previously released in October 2021. You can read more information about it’s features here.
However, with the 2022 Wave 1 release, Microsoft is enhancing the control in two major ways: first adding infinite scrolling to the control, and second by allowing inline editing in the control. You can read more about the control from Microsoft here.
We recently were able to play around with the new control and wanted to share some of the gotchas and lessons learned while doing so.
Multiple versions of grids available from Microsoft
While trying to enable the new grid control, we found there were multiple versions of “grids” available from Microsoft out there. There’s the “Read-only Grid (default)” control which is enabled for all tables by default as the name states, and the “Editable Grid” control which has been around for awhile that provides the ability to inline edit records from the list.
However, now there also is the “Power Apps Read-Only Grid” control which is the new grid launched in October 2021, and the “(Preview) Power apps grid control” which is the one being launched in the 2022 Wave 1 release.
You’ll notice above that while there being multiple controls, you have to navigate to the Classic editor to be able to add and edit these controls at the table/entity level.
Also note that on this new “(Preview) Power Apps grid control” you can click on the pencil icon next to the “Enable editing” property to be able to set this to Yes. The Microsoft documentation stated that you should also be able to add the alpha-jump bar to the grid, but that property does not exist on this new control to edit. However, it does appear on the “Power Apps Read-Only Grid” control. Hopefully Microsoft has a plan to merge all of these grid controls and/or remove some of the options to make it easier on makers designing apps.
Beware of Business Rules
When the old “Editable Grid” control was released, one of the biggest concerns was being able to edit any field inline in a view which had been locked down on the form by JavaScript or Business Rules or the native “Make read only” property of a form’s field. Thankfully back then, using a Business Rule such as the one below made the field read only on an editable grid. The only pain is that you would need to create one Business Rule for each field you wanted to lock down this way.
However, with the new “(Preview) Power Apps grid control” this no longer seems to be the case. All fields in the grid appear to be editable: ones that you have locked down via Business Rules, and even ones that you would think would natively be locked down such as the Opportunity Status value which should be controlled by the Close as Won, Close as Lost, and Reopen Opportunity buttons. Note, that the new control seems to allow me to change the Opportunity Status from Won or Lost to Open, but when you try to go from Open to Won or Lost, you get a notification that the record can’t be saved (even though the grid control seemed to allow you to make the change).
Power Apps Grid Control Oddities
A couple other weird behaviors we have noticed with this new editable grid is if you resize a column, when you click into another row the column width changes back to the original size before you modified it.
Also, a single click into a cell in the grid does not put you into edit mode. We had to perform more of a double click to change the cell from read only to editable, and then another click to click for those fields that weren’t simply text such as clicking on a calendar icon to select a date for a date field.
While having the infinite scroll is a nice feature to have, I don’t believe the current limitations and issues we’re noticing with this new control is worth the infinite scroll. We’re hoping that these issues are simply a part of the public preview of this feature and all kinks will be worked out prior to releasing this grid for general availability.