Power Apps Viking

Do you want to get rid of this button? Without using RibbonWorkbench or scripting?

You can do it very easily, in many cases at least.

What button are we talking about?

The “+Add Existing record” button looks like this and is shown just above the subgrid, in the top right menu.

So first of all, what does it actually do?

When working with Model Driven Apps and parent-child records, most citizen developers will at, some point, have experienced situations where you use a subgrid on a main form. You can of course then use the subgrid to quickly add new records (using the quick-create form to avoid navigating away from your main record), but theres another option to ‘+add existing records".

This shows two different use-cases.

1. One where we have to create each new row in the child table that is unique to the parent table and the relationship is created as part of this operation (by using the quick-create form.
2. Two second where a list of records already exist in the child table and they have not been assigned to a record in the parent table yet.

If you want the guide and screenshots of how this is enabled/disabled then scroll down a little bit.

For those that want to understand the table relationships and how it works you can read on here.

Example of the parent-child relationships

For example. I have a parent record which was the list of all my recent boat trips. In one child table I decide to maintain a list of all errors that I encounter while on each trip. Using a new table called “Error” which has a many-to-one relationship to the “Boat Trip” table. These records would be unique to the relationship between the Error table and the Boat Trip table where the lookup from Error to Boat Trip is filled out by creating them using the quick-create. In another example I could also have a list of people currently joining me on the trip. This Crew Members table also has a many-to-one relationship to the Boat Trip table. However, each Crew Member is only there temporarily and can only be on one single boat trip at a time. So instead of using the quick create. I assign them using the “+Add existing record” and can search for the people that are in the Crew Member table. This allows me to add people that are not assigned to any other Boat trip at the moment.

So. The ability to use “+ Add existing records” exists for a reason. But only makes sense in the second scenario described above. So, if you are only using the first scenario, you can change the setting of the relationship and remove the button from the interface completely. That’s pretty neat!

Working with the records

Now. So how do we do this. So lets say we have a parent record where we have added two tabs which each have a subgrid referencing two different child tables.

The parent record of course needs to be created first in order to create the child records where the relationship is added.

Optional child record

So how do the two subgrids work exactly and what does it look like. Let’s dive into it.

First, we look at the subgrid for the table where the relationship is optional and therefore has both options (one for adding new records and one for adding existing records)

The relationship is set the following way (I can see this by finding the lookup field under the relationships on my child table):

From the example above this corresponds to the Boat trip table and the Crew Member table, where the crew members do not need to be part of the Boat Trip table and therefore I can add any record from the Crew Member table as the lookup could currently be empty.

Business required child record

Then we have the subgrid for the table where the relationship is business required, which only has the “Add a new record” option and not the “+Add existing records”

The relationship is set the following way (I can see this by finding the lookup field under the relationships on my child table):

From the example previously this corresponds to the Error log on my Boat Trip table where I can’t create an error log that does not exist as part of a Boat Trip, and a specific Error should be moved to another Boat Trip. If the error occurs on multiple trips I would create multiple entries in the Error table.

Removing the Button

This means that you can remove the button by simply changing the relationship to be “Business Required”. However, for child records where you dont want the field to be mandatory (such as my example with the crew members), this is not a viable solution. In those cases you would need to use the RibbonWorkbench or scripting. There is also another case that should be considered. Say you want to use the Error table across multiple parent records. If I also wanted to track errors on my house building projects (in a new table called “House Project”) as well as Boat Trips. Furthermore, be aware that when a child record has been assigned to one child record, you can by default select it in the lookup, you should change the filter in the view used in the lookup to only include records where the lookup field does not contain data, to avoid finding records that are not available (for example, Crew Members that are already part of another Boat Trip).