Drop Down Control in PowerApps

Introduction

Drop down controls are commonly found in form applications as they conserve screen real estate. Unlike radio button control, drop down only occupy one line of space in your application until the user clicks to reveal the available choices.

Drop down occupies one line of space saving screen real estate

They are also an excellent alternative to text input controls when we want to ensure data integrity as drop down control prevent users from making a typo error in their inputs. For instance, with text input fields, user might key in “Blu” instead of the colour “Blue”.

In this article, we are going to look at the how we can create the list of options in drop down control

Drop down control in PowerApps Studio

In PowerApps studio, drop down control can be found when you select Insert-> Input-> Drop down

Drop down control in PowerApps Studio

Create list of values in drop down control

There are 2 ways to create options in drop down control:

1. Create list of options in the formula bar
2. Connect to data sources like Dataverse, Excel, SharePoint, Collections etc

Create list of options in the formula bar

To create a list of options, select Items in the property drop down and input an open and close square brackets. What it does is to tell PowerApps that we are going to create a list of options.

[]

If we leave it blank, you will notice that PowerApps has a yellow triangle warning sign on the top left hand corner of your drop down control and when you hover over it, it shows

Warning: The columns produced by this rule are all nested tables and/or records, however the property expects at least some columns of simple values (such as text, or numbers)

This means that PowerApps is expecting us to input either text or numbers between the square brackets and we can’t leave it blank. So let’s input some numbers in our list

[1,2,3,4,5]