What Is A Collection?

Imported reference from Matthew Devaney's blog for learning purposes. Original: https://www.matthewdevaney.com/powerapps-collections-cookbook/what-is-a-collection/. Author: Matthew Devaney.

What Is A Collection?

A collection is simply a Table of values.

Collections have rows, columns and cells just like a table in Excel does

All values in a column must be of the same data type (example: text, number, date, true/false)

The maximum number of rows that can be imported into a collection at once is 500 rows by default but this can be increased to 2,000 by changing the delegation limit

We can visualize a Collection as a table: City Continent Country New York North America USA London Europe United Kingdom Kyoto Asia Japan Osaka Asia Japan Los Angeles North America USA Paris Europe France Birmingham Europe United Kingdom

The code to create a Collection looks like this: //Create a collection

ClearCollect(myCities1, { City : "New York" , Country : "USA" , Continent : "North America" }, { City : "London" , Country : "United Kingdom" , Continent : "Europe" }, { City : "Kyoto" , Country : "Japan" , Continent : "Asia" }, { City : "Osaka" , Country : "Japan" , Continent : "Asia" }, { City : "Los Angeles" , Country : "USA" , Continent : "North America" }, { City : "Paris" , Country : "France" , Continent : "Europe" }, { City : "Birmingham" , Country : "United Kingdom" , Continent : "Europe" } ); Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) More collections facts:

A collection can be created from the values in a SharePoint List, Excel Spreadsheet, SQL, CDS or any other datasource

Collections only exist while an app is running. When the app is closed the data stored in a collection no longer exists.

Rows from a collection can be inserted back into the original datasource to change its values

Galleries, Forms and Data Tables can use a collection as the datasource

Using collections as a datasource can reduce loading times because data is stored on the local device rather than in the cloud.

Once a collection is created it can be accessed from any screen.