Concatenate string expressions in PowerApps Canvas apps using $ operator

Looking at the topic of this blog, you might be wondering – “What new I am going to learn here?” And specially if you have been working on PowerApps for some time, this question is even more relevant.

Let’s see what’s new in here. If you want to display a Welcome message to a user this is a formula we are accustomed to write.

"Welcome " & User().FullName & " to the canvas app portal"

Or we may use the Concatenate function.

Well either will work. But what if I could tell you that you can actually usually the $ symbol to concatenate the strings. If you have worked with C#, it is similar to string.format

$"Welcome {User().FullName} to the canvas app portal"

A much cleaner approach. Now the question comes what if we want to print the curly braces itself. Well in that case we need to escape the curly brace “{” with another curly brace “{“

The following formula will print “Welcome {Debajit Dutta to the canvas app portal“

$"Welcome {{{User().FullName} to the canvas app portal"

Good to see Microsoft aligning Power Apps with other language constructs.

Hope this quick tip helped! You will also like the below posts

Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP