10 Minutes To Learn Power Apps Maps

The Power Apps Maps control is an exciting new feature. Now we have the ability to include interactive maps in our apps and mark locations with pins. While the control looks very simple to use I found it took way more time to understand than I expected. I want others to have an easier time than me.

In this article I will help you learn how to use Power Apps Maps in 10 minutes or less.

Table of Contents
Enable Geospatial Services
Show Current Location
Mark Locations With A Pin
Customize Pin Icons And Colors
Group Pins In A Cluster
Display Info Cards For Pinned Locations
Centering The Map On A Default Location
Custom Satellite Mode Button
Custom Full Screen Mode Button

Enable Geospatial Services

Maps require the Geospatial Services setting to be turned on in your environment. To test whether this has been done, go to the Insert tab on the ribbon, open the Media menu and select Map. If a map appears on the screen then the service is already active and you don’t need to take any further action.

If you receive an error message when adding the Map control ask an administrator to enable the Geospatial services feature in the Power Apps Admin Center.

Show Current Location

We can show the user’s current location on the map with a pulsing blue dot.

To turn-on the blue go to the CurrentLocation property and set it to true.

true

The current location will not automatically detect the user’s position. We must manually define this using the Location function in the following properties.

CurrentLocationLongitude: Location.Longitude
CurrentLocationLatitude: Location.Latitude

Now when the map opens it will be centered on the users current location.

Mark Locations With A Pin

One or more important locations can be marked on the map with pins.

Create a new SharePoint list called Restaurant Locations with the following columns. Define the label column as single-line text and latitude/longitude as a number column.

In the Items property of the Map control use Restaurant Locations as the datasource.

'Restaurant Locations'

Then supply these additional properties with the code shown below and the map will show pins for each location.

ItemsLabels: "Label"
ItemsLatitudes: "Latitiude"
ItemsLongitudes: "Longitude"

One additional note: notice how the map is now centered on the pins instead of the user’s current location.

Customize Pin Icons And Colors

We can edit the location pins to have a different style than the standard color and icon. In fact, we even have the ability to edit the pin styles individually.

Add new single-line text columns for Color and Icon in the Restaurant Locations SharePoint list.

To show the newly added custom icons on the map use this code in the ItemsIcons property.

'Restaurant Locations'.Icon

Here’s a few of my favorite custom icons. For the full list of icons check out the Microsoft Azure Maps documentation.

Icon	Name
	Marker
	Marker-Square
	Marker-Ball-Pin
	Flag-Triangle
	Market-Flat

Next, to show the custom pin colors add this code to the ItemsColors property.

'Restaurant Locations'.Color

Pin colors must be stored as Hex Value (e.g #01B8AA). If you want to convert RGBA values to Hex try this simple tool.

Group Pins In A Cluster

When pins are close together it can be hard to tell just how many pins are being shown. This problem can be solved by grouping nearby pins into a cluster.

To enable this feature change the Clustering property to true.

true

Display Info Cards For Pinned Locations

Detailed location info can be displayed in a card when a user hovers over the pin.

Change the Show Info Cards property of On hover.

Add any columns you would like to show on the card inside the Edit Fields menu. For this example I added a few new columns to the SharePoint list with information. Address, Phone Number, and a Short Description of the location would be an excellent idea here.

Centering The Map On A Default Location

To manually define the Map control’s center location we can supply a default location. In the example below I have centered the map on a popular landmark (Portage & Main intersection) and zoomed out to show more streets.

Turn on the default location and fill-in the following properties to achieve the desired effect.

DefaultLocation: true
DefaultLatitude: 49.89524
DefaultLongitude: -97.137942
DefaultZoomLevel: 14

Custom Satellite Mode Button

The maps feature is missing a button for satellite mode. Fortunately, its very easy to create. Place a toggle in the app called tog_SatelliteView.

Then put this code in the Satellite property of the Map.

tog_SatelliteView.Value

Custom Full Screen Mode Button

Another missing feature is full-screen mode. What if our app had other UI elements forcing us to display a small version of the map. There should be a button to expand it when needed!

Insert a toggle called tog_FullScreen into the app.

Make sure the Map is on top of all the others controls. Then use this logic in the Height and Width properties.

Height: If(tog_FullScreen.Value, App.Height, 698)
Width: If(tog_FullScreen.Value, App.Width,915)

Now the map will re-size when tog_FullScreen is toggled.

Questions?

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