How to get an item at a particular position in a collection in Power Apps Canvas apps?

Here I am back with another blog on Power Apps and this time I shall discuss about one of the simplest requirements. Get an item at specific position inside a collection in Power Apps.

If I take this question to anyone exposed to basic programming, the answer shall be – “I would get it by index”. For example if I have a collection (commonly known as array or list) named DemoCollection, I would access the nth item of the array using the below syntax.

 var item = DemoCollection[n-1]

You might be wondering, why this blog? Well surprisingly in Power Apps, extremely complex things are so easy to do and sometimes the simplest of things require a workaround. And one such scenario is this one.

Unfortunately we can’t access item at specific position of collection using indexers. However you can do that with a little workaround.

I have a collection as below.

If I want to access the 3rd item in the collection, below is the formula for the same.

Last(FirstN(DemoCollection, 3)).Value

If I make the formula generic, it would be more like the one below. Here n is the position of the item I want to retrieve.

Last(FirstN(DemoCollection, n)).Value 

Hope this helped!

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Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP