PowerApps: How to use PowerApps to build a Claim Form System?

I’m still a newbie towards PowerApps, so bear with me. Well, you can leave your comments below for me to improve or pinpoint my faulty parts. 😀

I have been occupied lately, and now only I got the time to do a blog on PowerApps. As you those that know me, I don’t do much of development coding like a software engineer.

So this is my simple claim form system, I am still improving it by adding conditions.

*Note

  • You may need to change the permission on this page to allow the only administrator to have edit rights and where employees have only created and view rights.
  • This Blog may require some basic knowledge and understanding of PowerApps and SharePoint Online

So let’s begin on the user experience;

  1. First, I go to “Claim Form” then it will open up Expense Form

This is how it looks like under Site Contents > Expense Form.

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3. Select “New”

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4. Then it will expand the Expense Form;

I’ve got 5 different lists;

  • Title (What is this expense form about, How should you name it)
  • Start Date
  • End Date
  • Category (such as Parking expense, food expense, petrol)
  • Description (Optional, for employees to explain)
  • Amount
  • Attachment

I’ve got 2 functions;

  • Submit button (is at the top right)
  • Clear button (basically it will clear the entire fill up of information)

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  • After successfully submitted the form, you will be direct to a successful page;

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5. I even make few of the lists as a requirement to fill up, you could see a (*) at the lists.

6. After submitting an expense form, you will have a view of your submitted forms

  • Well, I am still trying to figure out how to not allow others to view others submitted claim forms though.

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Now the PowerApps part…

  1.  Create a new page for your SharePoint site
  2.  Then create a new content type, “List”
  3. You have to create the PowerApps based on the expense form list

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4. Create a New Blank PowerApps

5. Then I created a new form and rename it to “ClaimForm”, the naming for each action are pretty straight forward. This form will include the necessary data for an expense form. (Sorry about the ordering)

  • ExpenseForm – Is a label
  • ClearButton – Contain action to clear and reset the form
  • Data – Is an Edit form type (multiple choice for type of data)
  • AttachmentData – for upload attachment
  • AmountData – fill in the amount of expense
  • CategoryData – select choice of expense type
  • TitleData – To fill in name of expense form
  • StartDateData – Select start date of this expense
  • EndDateData – Select end date of this expense
  • DescrpitionData – Include any necessary explanation for expense form
  • SubmitButton – Submit the form
  • Bar – Design of the Expense Form

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6. To include choice information for the category, you have to include it at the List Settings of this Expense Form in SharePoint Online.

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7. For after successfully submitted of the expense form it will direct to a successful page.

I created another new form and named it “SuccessfulSubmitView”

  • Icon3 – Design
  •  SubmitMessage – a successful message
  • Circle2 – Design

 

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8. To have the expense form to direct to the successful page after successfully submit, you got to include action into the SubmitButton;

If(Rule1, SubmitForm(Data);
Navigate(SuccessfulSubmitView,ScreenTransition.Fade), 
SubmitForm(Data))

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9. To clear the form, you got to include action into the ClearButton

ResetForm(Data)

 

For exception, they have a default error action, you could edit that too. Example, if a data is not key in or the data doesn’t match with the condition it may have an error show.

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That’s all you have to know about creating a simple claim form system. Well, yes there is room for improvement. I probably got to spend a bit of time for the improvement. Hope you enjoy this.

 

 

 

 

 

SharePoint Online and Office 365 groups: What is the difference between soft delete and hard delete?

Yes, SharePoint Online and Office 365 groups (aka Unified Group) are concurrent. Example, if you have create a Microsoft Teams Group/Team or create an Office 365 groups or create a Team sites, Microsoft Office 365 will create a site or create a group for it too. However, now Microsoft Office 365 has a new category of create site, called Communication site. (FYI, I am still learning on it).
Anyway, I am here to provide a notice or knowledge to technical and end users, when comes to creating and editing/modification sites, everyone are very good at it. However, when it comes to deletion, no one really cares !
Now here comes the interesting part, try asking yourself “What actually happens, when i deleted a group?” and your possible answer is “Oh, it just went into my recycle bin.”. I couldn’t agree more to that answer but that is only partial information that you know about the deletion function.

â—‹ Definition of soft deletion – “Recycle bin with retention period of 30 days”
â—‹ Definition of hard deletion – “After retention period of 30 days and 93 days, Microsoft Online Service Garbage Collector (You will notice this from your Audit log in Security and Compliance), will automatically permanently force delete anything inside the recycle bin”
*Note:
â—‹ This may takes up to 24 hours or 48 hours for permanent deletion completion

Anyway, administrator and users don’t have to be afraid of 30 days retention, where now Microsoft has extended the retention to 93 days, where all things in recycle bin will be move to a secondary recycle bin. However, there is always a limited quota for secondary recycle bin, if exceeds than it will automatically purges the oldest items. (Please refer to the references)
References;

SharePoint Online: Why you should not Share your main site to external? What are the best practice?

As an organization, anything that is internal stays internal and if anything needs to be share to external, are only provided view permission to only specific site or documents, especially organization’s SharePoint Online or On premises main sites.

Providing sharing option for external is dangerous as this will causes sudden surprise of deleted sites or deleted documents, and users will start to compliant asking and demanding “How come that my site get deleted?” and another disadvantage is that even “Security & Compliance’s Audit Logging & SharePoint Audit Logging”, will not provide you the details of whom has perform the operation, because allowing anonymous to access to your organization’s main sites or any other private sites will not have result shown in audit logging.

For private sites or department sites, SharePoint Online share site permission, by default is Edit. Thus, if this falls on the hands of external, he or she can have the rights to delete or modify anything within the organization’s sites and copy any Private & confidential documents and exploit your data.

*Note:

  • Office 365 group is equal to SharePoint private site.
  • Only Owner of site has permission to perform deletion
  • If audit logging is not enable on the site, activities will not shown in Security & Compliance and SharePoint Online Audit report
  • By default, audit logging is disable for private sites

Best practices;

  1. Set sharing for Main site to “Allow only internal”
  2. Try to make use of OneDrive for document sharing
  3. Enable Rights Management Service for SharePoint Online
  4. Anything internal, Stays internal
  5. Educate users on the risk of sharing to external parties
  6. Enabled Audit logging for all private sites (Only owner of the sites has permission)
    • Without this you Global admin has no visibility to that site’s behavior, even with Security & Compliance
  7. Restrict users from creating Office 365 groups (optional)