Branch Contact Groups v2.34

Built 24 Jul 2026 BST

Live-membership replacement for ~50 Outlook contact groups in the zero mailbox — send to groups with always-current membership, no more manual weekly rebuilds. v2.0 adds a dedicated People screen, Thursday send-splitting into two independent batches, automatic BCC-locking for external addresses, per-group history, and paste-to-replace bulk roster updates.

Before You Start

1. Create the four SharePoint lists below (all columns, exact names) on <your SharePoint site URL>.
2. Add the two maintainer rows to BM Maintainers and your real group/member data (see the Migration Plan card below).
3. Open Power Apps Studio → New blank canvas app (tablet layout).
4. Add all data sources listed below (Data panel → Add data).
5. Set App → OnStart using the code block below.
6. Create four blank screens (name them exactly as shown), then paste each YAML in order: scrQuickContacts, scrSendEmail, scrManageGroups, scrManagePeople.
7. These screens use manual X/Y positioning throughout. Anything too tall to fit on one screen (Manage Groups' member panel, Manage People's Add Person/Remove Leaver panels) is a centered lightbox instead of a scrolling section — see Manual Fixes below for small property-level tweaks that don't need a full re-paste.

Data Connections

Add these in the Data panel before pasting any YAML:

SharePoint Lists

List: BM Groups

The old Active column has been removed entirely — it's not used anywhere in v2.0. If you built v1.0 already, delete that column.

"Last modified" note: the app shows SharePoint's built-in Modified date, and every formula that changes membership (add/remove/replace) also does a harmless self-Patch on the group's own Title so Modified reflects membership changes too, not just edits to the group record itself.

Versioning: List Settings → Versioning Settings → "Create a version each time you edit an item" = Yes.

Permissions: List Settings → Permissions for this list → Stop Inheriting Permissions → grant Edit to the two maintainers, Read to everyone else on the site.

List: BM Memberships

One row per person-per-group (deliberately denormalised — a person in 3 groups is 3 rows). This mirrors how Outlook contact groups actually work and keeps every query in the app a plain, delegable Filter. The new Manage People screen is a view over this same table grouped by email — no separate "people" list needed. JMC and County/Contingent genuinely belong to the membership row (not the person), since the same person could have different regional metadata in different groups — Manage People's per-person card picks whichever membership row happens to be found first as a reasonable approximation.

Versioning: enabled, same as BM Groups — gives you a native audit trail as a backstop; the app-level BM History list below is the human-readable one you'll actually use day to day.

Permissions: same unique-permission pattern as BM Groups — Edit for the two maintainers, Read for everyone else.

Pasting the standard import sheet (v2.34)

The Replace all (paste) tab inside Manage Members now recognises two formats automatically, based on how many tab-separated columns each pasted row has:

Example: Maj / Victor / HUGHES → Name = "Maj Victor HUGHES". A header row is fine to include in the paste — it fails the email-format check and gets silently skipped, the same way blank/invalid rows always have. The old two-column Name/Email paste still works exactly as before for groups that don't have this structured data — the parser just checks the column count per pasted block and picks the matching format.

List: BM Maintainers

This list exists specifically so adding a future maintainer is a one-row add to a SharePoint list, not an app edit — no formula change, no republish. Add the two starting rows yourself:

Permissions: anyone who should use the in-app Manage Maintainers button needs Edit access to this list, because Power Apps cannot bypass SharePoint list permissions. Everyone else only needs Read access so the app can check User().Email. The app blocks removing yourself and blocks removing the final maintainer, but SharePoint permissions are still the hard gate.

List: BM History (new in v2.0)

One row per membership/group event. The app writes to this list every time someone is added, removed, a group is created/edited, or a roster is bulk-replaced. The 🕘 history icon on each group reads this list filtered by GroupName, newest first — this is what answers "who was added or removed, and when" over time. No custom timestamp column needed; the built-in Created date is used directly.

Versioning: not needed — this list is itself the audit trail; individual rows are never edited after creation.

Permissions: same as BM Groups/BM Memberships — Edit for maintainers (the app writes here on their behalf), Read for everyone (the history icon is visible on the Send Email screen too, not just Manage Groups).

List: BM Saved Selections (new in v2.35)

The Send Email screen uses this list to save, load, and delete reusable group selections. Add this SharePoint list as a data source before pasting scrSendEmail v2.26.

App.OnStart

Paste into App → OnStart in Power Apps Studio. This is never part of any screen's YAML. Check varModDomain matches your real domain — it's set to mod.gov.uk below.

Set(varModDomain, "mod.gov.uk");
Set(varMyEmail, Lower(User().Email));
ClearCollect(colMaintainers, 'BM Maintainers');
Set(varIsMaintainer, CountRows(Filter(colMaintainers, Lower(Email) = varMyEmail)) > 0);
ClearCollect(colGroups, AddColumns(Sort('BM Groups', SortOrder, SortOrder.Ascending), Ticked, false));
ClearCollect(colMemberships, Filter('BM Memberships', false)); ForAll(colGroups As grp, Collect(colMemberships, Filter('BM Memberships', GroupName = grp.Title)));
ClearCollect(colThursdayBatchOptions, ["None", "Batch 1", "Batch 2"]);
Set(varRecipientField, "bcc");
Set(varBccForcedByBatch, false);
Set(varBccForced, false);
Set(varPreviewGroupID, Blank());
Set(varShowLightbox, false);
Set(varLightboxMode, "");
Set(varLightboxGroupID, Blank())

Screens

Paste each screen in order. Create a new blank screen first, name it exactly as shown, then paste.

Manual Fixes

Small property-level tweaks that are quicker to make directly in Studio than to re-paste a whole screen for. Select the named control, open its property list (Advanced tab, or the dropdown at the top of the formula bar), and edit only the property named — leave everything else on the control alone. This list grows as new ones come up; check it before doing a full delete-and-repaste for something small.

v2.36 — drpEditThursdayBatch opens blank instead of defaulting to None

For existing groups, the old Default formula only looked for the raw stored SharePoint choice value. If that value is blank, stale in colGroups, or has whitespace/casing differences, the dropdown cannot find a matching row in colThursdayBatchOptions and renders blank. Select scrManageGroups → drpEditThursdayBatch and replace the Default property with:

LookUp(
    colThursdayBatchOptions,
    Lower(Trim(Value)) =
        Lower(Trim(Coalesce(LookUp(colGroups, ID = varManageGroupID).ThursdayBatch.Value, "None")))
)

v2.8 — Dead click: DisplayMode.View combined with OnSelect

DisplayMode.View disables interaction entirely on a Classic/Button, not just its hover/press styling — a button with both properties set looks completely normal but never responds to a tap, with no error anywhere. Fix: select the control, delete its DisplayMode property so it goes back to default. Nothing else on the control needs to change.

v2.9 — Clicking a group card on Send Email did nothing

galGroups' own OnSelect (Set(varPreviewGroupID, ThisItem.ID)) never fired, because its child recRowFrame covers the entire card. Correction, found in v2.10 below: the real reason was that recRowFrame still had DisplayMode: =DisplayMode.View left over from before this app's DisplayMode scrub — it hadn't been caught earlier because at scrub time it had no OnSelect yet, so it didn't match the "View + OnSelect" search. It still fully absorbed the tap (per the v2.8 entry above) without being able to act on it, which is why the gallery's own OnSelect never got a chance to fire either.

Fix on scrSendEmail, gallery galGroups → child recRowFrame: add a new OnSelect property with the formula Set(varPreviewGroupID, ThisItem.ID), and delete its DisplayMode property if it's still set to View. Both steps are needed together. The gallery's own (now-dead) OnSelect can be deleted, but leaving it doesn't hurt anything.

v2.10 — Tapping the visible text on a card/row does nothing, only the blank margins respond

Once a background control like recRowFrame has a working OnSelect, any Label sitting on top of it (group name, member count, notes line, etc.) still blocks the tap from reaching it — in Power Apps, a control fully occupies its own space for hit-testing regardless of whether it has any click behavior of its own, so a Label with no OnSelect does not let clicks pass through to whatever's behind it. The practical result: only the empty gaps around the text respond, not the text itself.

Fix (built into the YAML as of v2.10, no manual action needed if you re-paste): rather than repeating the same OnSelect on every Label — fragile, easy to miss one — a single fully transparent Button (Fill: =RGBA(0,0,0,0), no border, full row size) sits in front of the Labels but behind any small control that needs its own distinct click (a checkbox, an icon). Being transparent, it doesn't hide anything visually; being in front of the Labels, it catches every tap across the whole row regardless of where the text sits. Z-order in this app's YAML is simple: later children render in front of earlier ones, so the order that makes this work is: decorative background → Labels → transparent click-catcher → any small distinct-action controls (checkbox/icons) last.

v2.33 — Six fixes, as hand-applied edits (no full-screen re-paste needed)

These are written as targeted property edits on named controls (find the control in the tree, open its formula bar, paste in just the one property) plus a short list of brand-new controls to insert. Nothing here requires deleting or re-pasting a whole screen, so any manual text-size/spacing tweaks you've already made elsewhere are untouched.

1. scrSendEmail — Thursday Batch buttons ticking nothing

Cause: the buttons always forced BCC-locked mode even when zero groups actually had that Thursday Batch set, which read as "broken" rather than "nothing to select yet."

2. scrSendEmail — clear (X) button on group search

New control to insert: an Icon, positioned just inside the right edge of txtGroupSearch.

3. scrManageGroups — Delete group button

New control in the edit-group lightbox, next to Cancel. Uses the same tap-twice-to-confirm pattern as the member/maintainer trash icons already in this app.

Also add a new global variable — it needs initialising to false somewhere it's set before first use. Simplest: add Set(varConfirmDeleteGroupArmed, false); as one more line in the Screen's own OnVisible property (select the screen itself in the tree, not a control), and again at the end of each of these three existing OnSelect formulas so the confirm-state resets whenever a different group's edit lightbox opens: btnNewGroup, the group row's recRowClickCatcher, and icoRowEdit — in each, add Set(varConfirmDeleteGroupArmed, false); right before the final Set(varShowLightbox, true) line.

4. scrManageGroups — GAL search flicker fix (two search boxes)

Same cause as the Manage People one below — Office365Users.SearchUserV2(...) was called directly in a gallery's Items, causing background flicker. Fix for the "Add people" tab's GAL search:

Because Reset() doesn't fire OnChange, also add a line re-seeding the empty-result collection wherever these two search boxes get Reset()'d: icoRowManageMembers.OnSelect (after Reset(txtGalSearch), add ClearCollect(colGalSearchResults, Filter(Office365Users.SearchUserV2({searchTerm: "zzzzzzzzzz", top: 1}).value, false));), the "add from GAL" tile's tap handler (same line, after its own Reset(txtGalSearch)), btnMaintainersNav.OnSelect and btnUseMaintainerGal.OnSelect (same pattern with colMaintainerGalSearchResults). Also seed both collections once in the Screen's OnVisible, same empty-filter formula.

5. scrManageGroups — clear (X) buttons

All three: Color: =RGBA(160,160,160,1), Tooltip: ="Clear search".

6. scrManagePeople — Remove Leaver group list, clear buttons, and its own GAL search flicker fix

Remove Leaver group list: new Gallery inserted between the existing lblPurgeMatch label and the btnPurgeFromAll button.

Then two small existing-control edits: shrink lblPurgeMatch's Height from 50 to 30 (its X/Y stay the same, it just no longer needs room for a second line), and move btnPurgeFromAll's Y from 320 down to 436 so it sits below the new list.

Clear (X) buttons:

All three: Icon.Cancel, Color: =RGBA(160,160,160,1), Tooltip: ="Clear search".

GAL search flicker fix (Add Person tab), same pattern as item 4 above:

Re-seed colAddPersonGalResults (same empty-filter formula) wherever txtAddPersonSearch gets Reset()'d: btnAddPersonTrigger.OnSelect and the successful-add branch of btnAddPerson.OnSelect. Also seed it once in the Screen's OnVisible.

v2.34 — JMC / County-Contingent / Name split out of Title, and the standard import sheet

Given the size of this change, it's applied as a full screen re-paste rather than a manual property list — see the SharePoint schema notes above (BM Memberships section) for the new Name, JMC, and County/Contingent columns and the exact import-sheet mapping.

Add the three new columns to BM Memberships in SharePoint first (Name, JMC, County/Contingent — all Single line of text, Not Required), then delete each of the three screens and paste fresh into new blank screens rather than pasting over the existing ones — Studio's paste is additive/merge, not a full replace, so a control that got renamed or removed as part of a fix can be left behind on the canvas with its old bindings still intact.

• Name is now the field the app actually reads and writes for a person's display name — Title is kept only as a mirror so SharePoint's own list view still shows something readable; the app itself never reads Title again.
• Manage Groups: the member card in "Manage Members" now shows JMC and County/Contingent above Name/Email (each line hidden automatically when blank); the manual add/edit form has two new optional fields for them; the paste-import box auto-detects the standard 7-column sheet vs. the old 2-column Name/Email format by counting columns per pasted line.
• Manage People: person cards in the main list now show the same JMC/County/Contingent/Name/Email layout — since these two fields technically belong to a specific group-membership row rather than the person, the card shows whichever membership row is found first as a reasonable approximation.
• Send Email: unchanged — it continues to show groups, not individual people, by design.

Further Reading

Issues

Found a problem? Report it here.