RELEASE NOTES
I’ve made quite a few updates to the Company Happenings Power App Template.
Here’s a quick run-down of all the changes you’ll find in Version 2 of the Company Happenings Power App
This is a FREE Power App that I’m sharing with the community.
Bug Fix
There is an issue with how SharePoint calendar data is delivered to Power Apps. It is complicated, so I have written a full blog article about the issue and how I resolved it.
In essence, Start & end times for “All Day” events are handled completely different than the data for events with specific start & end times. This would be easy to resolve if they delivered the “All Day” event checkbox field to PowerApps, but they don’t. The end result is a known issue with revealing SharePoint calendar data in Power Apps. I was not able to find any published work-around for this, so I invented one, hence the article so I can share the fix with the community.
Please vote for Microsoft to fix this issue so the complicated work-around won’t be required. There are 2 posted requests, so please vote here too.
Design Improvements
I’ve aligned the design more closely with the look & feel of Calendar events in SharePoint.
Home Screen
Eliminated the star icon to identify important events and replaced it with a simple red rule around the date
Detail screen navigation arrows are now a larger target for fingers to hit
Detail Screens
Detail screens now reveal ALL future events, no longer limited to the next 7 days. Note that home screen is still limited to next 7-days.
Image
Changed the event header image to a thumbnail, and moved it from the background to the foreground.
The event image is now clickable, and will take you to the event detail screen in SharePoint.
Dates
Formatting is now similar to SharePoint Event Web Part.
Important Events
Eliminated the star icon to identify important events and replaced with a simple red rule around the date.
Event Metadata
Reorganized the event metadata
All New Landscape Version
Updated Portrait
New Landscape
Why this makes sense
A common place to position the Power App, on your Intranet Home page is in the right-hand column. This looks great when the screen is full-width, but when viewing in a reduced-size window, or on a tablet, this important “top-of-page” item moves to the bottom of the page. Not Good.
Changing the orientation to Landscape allows us to move the web part to the primary content area and conserve valuable space.
My recommendation is to provide the Portrait version as a mobile app to your users, and to use the Landscape version only on your Intranet.
The landscape detail screens are particularly nice. I was able to increase the image size to 16:9 proportions, which is the best proportion for images in SharePoint. I think this and other little tweaks to the layout make the landscape version my preferred design of the two.
Final Notes
Instructions for Changing Data Sources:
I recently added a video demo on how to change my data sources to yours. This can be found in the Happenings Power App blog article.
Images Issue:
PowerApps has an issue where it doesn’t show images when used on a mobile device. Images will appear fine in the desktop version of the app or in the web browser version, but they do not appear on mobile.
There used to be a work-around where you linked to the original file rather than a sharepoint link of the file, however that appears to no longer work.
