Sometimes when we are working with PowerApps, adding new connections like to Microsoft Flow or external services and then we decide we don’t need some of them anymore and therefore we are removing it, but forgetting to first delete it in PowerApps, we are finding ourselves in situation, where when trying to export the app as a package, we are facing a very hard to debug issue.
When preparing for a new project, I started to check whether different customer expectations are feasible with PowerApps. The first of these is the ability to use an XML file as input, to build a table in the application and possibly to save them to SQL later.
The functionality in PowerApps allowing to export an application and then import it in a different environment or to migrate it this way to your customer’s tenant is known. However this works like a charm when talking about standalone apps. Is it possible to import a list form made in PowerApps as well? Yes! Maybe not very straightforward, but yes.
In Nintex 2010, 2013 and 2016 for SharePoint (Standard version even) on-premise of course, there was a possibility to use Excel Services to query and work with the xlsx and xls files’ data. However, in Sharepoint Online there is no such powerful mechanism (well, there are Excel Services available via REST API, but it doesn’t provide that much functionality). Moreover Nintex products for SharePoint Online (neither Nintex Workflow Cloud nor Nintex for Office 365) don’t have any “OOTB” actions that would fill that gap. So in the end, there is no straightforward way to achieve it. So how can I import (and preferably automate it) data from XLSX file into SharePoint?
The most common workaround is to convert the xlsx file into a plain, csv file and then to work with the data from the file using collections (I will write about it in second post).
Recently I have realized, that there is a set of Excel actions in Microsoft Flow! All of us, who has SharePoint Online, has also a free version of Flow available.