Data gateways allow users to connect online services, such as Power BI service, Power Automate, and Power Apps to on-prem data sources such as SQL databases, SharePoint server lists and libraries, and network shares.
As you can imagine, you wouldn’t want everyone installing their own individual gateways throughout your organization. Managing and sharing those centrally is much more efficient (and secure). You can manage who is allowed via the Power Platform admin center at admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com.
Note: You must be one of these roles to restrict gateway installers:
Azure AD Global administrator
Office 365 Global admin
Power BI service administrator
Restricting installations does not impact gateway administration. You can assign and re-assign users to administer and use gateways at any time. The following steps are strictly to manage who is able to install an enterprise gateway on a machine.
I’m working on digitizing a form to improve the user experience and our data collection and availability efforts. I decided to do this one in PowerApps as we begin to pivot organizationally toward the modern experience.
During building this particular form, I needed to hide fields unless the user indicated “Yes” to corresponding dropdown fields. Here’s the end-result:
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To get this to work we have to do three steps:
Initialize variables for visibility
Set the conditional fields’ visibility to the new variables
Set the dropdown to toggle the related variable
Initialize variables for visibility
First we need to tell our app that we’ll be using true/false variables to indicate the visibility of our conditional fields. We do this from the OnVisible property (2) of the Form Screen (1).
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The formula itself should be as follows (3). Use a semi-colon between each UpdateContext function to add additional variables. I’m using aVisible, bVisible, etc.
So in your documentation you might note something like:
Variable
Default state
Changed by
Hides/Shows
aVisible
false (hidden)
BAARequired (dropdown)
BAAEffectiveDate
bVisible
false (hidden)
ConflictsOfInterest (dropdown)
Conflicts…Completed
cVisible
false (hidden)
DataSecurityRisk (dropdown)
DataSec…Completed
Note: You can use the same variable more than once to show/hide multiple fields based on one dropdown.
Set the conditional fields’ visibility to the new variables
Now we need to assign these variables to the DataCards for each field we wish to hide.
From the Tree View panel, select the DataCard (not the DataCardValue within/beneath it) for the field you wish to hide (1). Then go to its Visible property (2). Finally, set the property’s function to the variable you initialized for it (3). In this example I decided I would use “cVisible” for “DataSecurityRiskCompleted”.
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Repeat the steps above, assigning variables to each field you want to hide until a dropdown is changed to the triggering value.
Set the dropdown to toggle the related variable
The last step is to tell the variables we established to change based on a dropdown.
First select the DataCardValue (not the DataCard) within the data card (1).
Then select the OnChange property (2) and set the function to the following (3):
Repeat for each dropdown that should serve as a trigger for conditional fields. Now, when I publish my app, changing “Data Security Risk” to “Yes” will change the default false visibility of DataSecurityRiskCompleted to true. If I change the dropdown to “No” again, it will hide the related field again.
This post will introduce you to some basic conditional formatting, rules & validation ideas you can implement today in your customized SharePoint forms using PowerApps. And don’t worry – if you start making changes to your form and don’t want to keep them, you can easily switch back to the original SharePoint form.
