How to create checklists using galleries in Power Apps!

Introduction

Creating checklists using Power Apps is a pretty common use case. I have done that on numerous projects. One of them, that anyone and everyone can take a look at and use, is the Inspections app that I created as a sample app for Dataverse for Teams. You can download that app from here. In this Inspections sample app, the questions are not grouped into sections. This may be fine for checklists that aren't too long. But on one of my latest projects, the checklists were supposed to have around 50-60 questions. Having those many questions can lead to a pretty bad user experience. Grouping these questions into sections that can be expanded/collapsed can significantly improve the user experience. In this post, we will look at a few methods to have user-friendly checklists.

Data model

To illustrate these method, we will be using 2 tables:

1. Questions
2. Sections

I have used Dataverse tables in my example but these could easily be any other data source like SharePoint.

The following are the columns on the Questions table:

1. Name - for the question text
2. Sequence - so the questions can be sorted
3. Section - lookup to the Sections table
4. Type - choice column to denote if a question is a text or choice question (more question types can be added if necessary)

The following are the columns on the Sections table:

1. Name - for the name of the section
2. Sequence - so the sections can be sorted within a checklist

Multiple ways

As mentioned above, there are a few different ways in which checklists can be created. I will be sharing a post on each one of them in the next few days and adding links to those posts here:

1. Nested galleries
2. Single vertical gallery
3. Single horizontal gallery

Summary

Checklists are a pretty common use case for Power Apps and there are multiple ways to achieve that functionality. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. I will be covering those in a separate post.

PS: If you want to watch a video of me presenting on this topic and other gallery related fun, here is a link.

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