Elements of a Table in Power Apps

In this exercise, we will learn about the Elements of a table in Power Apps.

Let the table will be assumed to be from a data source named MyFriends.

Let’s explain each element of the table:

a) Records

A record means row in a table. The most common way to retrieve a record from a table is to use the LookUp function.

For example, to return the record where the Name column value is Ashish, we would use the following formula.

PowerApps Formula

This would return the entire record for the Ashish name.

Create Records in Power apps We can create records also by using curly braces {}. For example, this record { Name: "Ashish", Experience: 7.99 } isn't associated with a table. Note that field names, such as Name and Experience in the record, aren't enclosed in double quotation marks.

b) Table

A table holds one or more records. We can create a table using the Table function in power apps.

Example:

PowerApps Formula

The above formula contains the single column table with column name Value. We can also define a single-column table with square brackets. An equivalent way to write the above code:

PowerApps Formula

c) Fields

A field is an individual piece of information in a record. We can visualize this as a value in a column for a record.

As with a control, we refer to a field from the record by using the decimal (.) operator on the record.

Syntax Record.Column_Name

For example, LookUp(MyFriends, Name = "Ashish").City returns the value Sonipat. We could display this output in a Label control or use it with other controls or functions within our app where we need to reference the value.

d) Columns A column refers to the same field for one or more records in a table. The above table has three columns, shown horizontally across the top:

• Name
• City
• Marks

The column's name reflects the fields in that column. All values within a column are of the same data type. The "Marks" column of Number data type always contains a number and cannot contain a string. The value of any field can also be blank.

Syntax Table.Column_name

The above syntax returns the entire column values from the table.

Sometimes we need to reference an entire column for a function or control. For example, if we want to use the Name column to populate the choices in a drop-down control. We could reference the Name column by setting the Items property for the drop-down control to MyFriends.Name. This would then populate the drop-down control with Ashish, Gaurav, Siddhant and Richa.