Today while working with a Power Apps form I ran into an issue where I wanted to display the history of a SharePoint text field in my form.
In SharePoint you can modify your Mulitiple Lines of Text field, so that every time a change is made to the field, the change is appended to a history:
The result of the above configuration example will look as the following in the SharePoint list when making changes to the field:
So, in my case I wanted to display this complete history in my PowerApps form from in a field called “Description” (in Danish “Beskrivelse”):
To my surprise this was not really possible. I was only able to get the last entry to be displayed in my text field. But this did not resolve my requirement as I would like to display the complete history of appended text, as a kind of documentation of all log entries. Off course I could just look directly into the SharePoint list for this information, but what is the purpose of using Power Apps then?
What I did find was a solution based on MS Flow (see this article: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/display-appended-comments-version-history-from-sharepoint-list-on-powerapps/)
This solution actually worked out, but having to rely on a Flow in order to resolve a very simple requirement, may be a bit too much. My concern is also that the execution time of the flow may have an impact on the user experience. Imagine what would happen if there is a delay of the flow completion? – which is very likely in Microsoft 365.
My conclusion is, that there is no really good solution for solving this problem until Microsoft provides a fully functional way of displaying the field history in PowerApps. I have seen several User Voice entries where people are asking for this feature. Let’s hope it will be there soon.