PowerApps distinct collections

When you have large arrays or collections of data and and the data has duplicates, you migth want to use the PowerApps distinct function

Power Apps distinct function

There is a Distinct function which returns a unique list of values however that only works on a single field. So that is great for filling drop downs but not very good when you want to fill a gallery with data.

In this post I will describe an easy way to solve this problem.

I started by creating  a collection that looks like this:

[
{Title:"Item1", Description: "Description 1"},
{Title:"Item1", Description: "Description 1"},
{Title:"Item2", Description: "Description 2"},
{Title:"Item3", Description: "Description 3"},
{Title:"Item3", Description: "Description 3"}
]

Within a Gallery this could look like this:

As you can see I’ve got 5 items and 2 of them are duplicates

To get my gallery to display the items I’m setting the OnStart of my app to:

[{Title:"Item1", Description: "Description 1"},
{Title:"Item1", Description: "Description 1"},
{Title:"Item2", Description: "Description 2"},
{Title:"Item3", Description: "Description 3"},
{Title:"Item3", Description: "Description 3"}
]

Now I can use the distinct function to create myself an index unique items

ClearCollect(MyIndex, Distinct(MyItems, Title));

Using the MyIndex I can now create a gallery of list items

However this still doesn’t give me all the columns.

Now setting the label value to:

First(Filter(MyItems,Title = ThisItem.Result)).Description

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Unique items with Distinct function