#PowerPlatformTip 54 – ‘Use Galleries’

💡 Challenge

Designing menus in Power Apps with individual buttons leads to inconsistent layouts, tedious styling, and manual updates for each item.

✅ Solution

Leverage the Gallery control to render menu items dynamically from a single data source, ensuring uniform appearance and simplified maintenance.

🔧 How It’s Done

Here’s how to do it:

1. Insert a Gallery
   🔸 In the toolbar choose Insert > Gallery > Blank Vertical.
   🔸 Position it where you want your menu to appear.

2. Set the Items property
   🔸 Define a collection or table, e.g.
   powerapps ClearCollect(MenuItems, {Icon: Icon.Home, Label: “Home”, Screen: HomeScreen}, {Icon: Icon.Settings, Label: “Settings”, Screen: SettingsScreen}, {Icon: Icon.Help, Label: “Help”, Screen: HelpScreen} );

   🔸 Set Gallery.Items = MenuItems.

3. Design the template
   🔸 Inside the gallery, add an Icon control and set Icon = ThisItem.Icon.
   🔸 Add a Label control and set Text = ThisItem.Label.
   🔸 Apply theme colors and spacing for a polished look.
4. Configure navigation
   🔸 Select the template and set
   OnSelect = Navigate(ThisItem.Screen, ScreenTransition.Fade).
   🔸 Optionally highlight the selected item using a conditional fill.
5. Maintain your menu
   🔸 To add or remove items, update the MenuItems data source or collection.
   🔸 Changes appear instantly without modifying multiple controls.

🎉 Result

A dynamic, data-driven menu that maintains consistent styling, scales easily with new items, and improves the user experience.

🌟 Key Advantages

🔸 Consistency across all menu items with a single template.
🔸 Flexibility to add, remove, or reorder entries by updating the data source.
🔸 Simplified maintenance and fewer controls to manage.

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🎥 Video Tutorial

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🛠️ FAQ

1. What is the advantage of using a Gallery over individual buttons?
A Gallery lets you define a single layout template and data-bind it, providing uniform styling and centralized maintenance for all menu entries.

2. Can I use images or custom icons in a gallery?
Yes. You can add image controls inside the gallery template and set their Image or Icon property to a URL or icon constant from your data source.

3. Does using a Gallery affect performance?
Galleries support virtualization for large data sets. For typical menu sizes (5–10 items), performance is excellent and simplifies your app’s logic.