Create a clone command in Power Apps Model Driven Apps

In Power Apps you can create custom commands in your views when developing Model Driven Apps. In this post I’m looking at how you can develop a clone command button to clone records in specific tables.

My Setup

I’ve created a table called animals. This table has a number of fields that I want to use for my app. I’ve also updated the main form and the active records view, so that I can use those in my app that I have developed.

Create an Clone Model Driven app

Now that I have my table ready, I can create the app.

Within my app I can add a page to access my Dataverse Table. This means that my table will be available in the navigation of my app.

I’m selecting my animal table and make sure that I keep the Show in navigation ticked.

Within my Animal view, there is an option to add edit the command bar.

Commands can appear in different places. For our app I want to add the command to the Main grid. So when my animal records are displayed I want to be able to select my records before I clone my records.

Within the Command Bar editor we add Commands, Dropdowns and Split Buttons. Command is the option that we want

The first time we add a Command we will see the following dialogue. I’m selecting Power Fx as I want to create Power FX to develop out custom clone button.

Configure the Clone Button’s visibility

Now we can give our Command a new name, as by default every command is called NewCommand. Additionally, you could also select an icon to make the command look better in the app.

In general I prefer to open the component library (top right menu) first as I will need to do this to publish the component anyway.

To configure the clone button’s visibility we can set the Visible property using the following code:

CountRows(Self.Selected.AllItems)>0

With the above Visibility setting, we make sure that the Clone Animal option is visible only when records have been selected.

Implement Cloning

So far we have a command that will appear at the righjt time, but we haven’t configured the behaviour of the command yet.

ForAll(Self.Selected.AllItems, 
    Patch(Animals,Defaults(Animals),
        {
            Name: "CLONE - " & ThisRecord.Name,
            Details: ThisRecord.Details
        }
   )
)

The above code is fairly similar to how you would do this in a Canvas App. Yes, Power FX is fairly similar for both Canvas and Model Driven Apps. There are just some limitations here and there.

ForAll, Patch, Defaults are all functions that we use in Canvas Apps. The only thing that may need some explaining is the Self.Selected.AllItems. Self is referring to the View that we are using. Self.Selected.AllItems gives you all the items that have currently been selected.

Testing the Clone feature

Now that when run our app, we can select our records and the Clone Animal option will appear.

And once we clicked on the Clone Animal command, we will find that our records are cloned.