#Shorts — Boosting your Forms with the MultiSelect PCF Control
The emergence of the Power Apps Control Framework (PCF) brings a whole new set of possibilities.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you want to store a one-to-many relationship between two entities in an easy to store and maintainable way.
Lets take an example, a small team is responsible for managing multiple accounts and the requirement is to be able to associate team members to the account that they manage (I know its a trivial example).
The challenge here is that immediately a developer is forced to create a relationship between the entities (Account and User) and add a sub-grid to the form to visualise the one-to-many. There are benefits to this such as referential integrity of the data but the overhead can sometimes just not be worth it and the user experience can be painful.
As an alternative, we can use the MultiSelect control that can be found here which handles this scenario in a very user friendly way while minimising space taken on the form. The control is built using the brilliant React-Select component.
Customising the form involves overriding the default text box with the MultiSelect control and setting the properties. If you have configured it correctly it will look similar to this..
..and when we open the form we should be greeted with the nicely rendered PCF control:
When to use this approach
- When you are not storing many records (you have a 4000 character limit in the text field)
- You wish to maximise screen real estate and avoid grids everywhere
- You want to ‘tag’ records
Special Mention
Special thanks to Jed Watson for providing an excellent library to build from.
For further reading on the PowerApps Control Framework, I strongly recommend that you visit this link.
If you already work with PCF, then take a look at our open roles and see if there is an opportunity for you to #AceYourCareer.
