Power Fx is a low-code language that makers can work with directly in an Excel-like formula bar or Visual Studio Code text window.

Power Fx are the main coding language in Canvas apps and have been extended to Model Driven apps as well to be used from the Command bar to execute actions in addition to JavaScript, and is used as well as a new column type similar to calculated columns.

In this quick article we will see how we can clone a contact record directly by clicking a button on the form command bar:

1. Add your model driven app in a solution and open
2. Navigate to Pages->Contacts View-> Click the 3 horizontal dots and choose Edit Command Bar ->Edit

3. Select Main Form and click Edit

4. Select New -> New Command from the commands left Navigation.

5. You will be promoted with a question whether you want to create a Power FX command or JavaScript for Power Fx it will need to create a component library to enable you to use the Power FX formulas -> Choose Power FX and click Next

6. Give you new command a label “Clone Contact“, in the Action shows to run Formula and you will see the Formula Bar is opened by default on the On Select Event, you can also change the visibility to run based on a formula

7. For the actual command we need to use the very popular Patch function and the key thing here is how to access the fields in the current form so it is very easy using the below expression:

Self.Selected.Item

This expression gives you access to the current object and then you can access the fields easy as

Self.Selected.Item.'Last name'

The below command will be cloning the first name, last name and company name which is a lookup to the account table.

Patch(Contacts,Defaults(Contacts),{'First name':Concatenate("copy",Self.Selected.Item.'First name')},{'Last name':Self.Selected.Item.'Last name'},{
    'Company':Self.Selected.Item.'Company'
})

Note:

I could not make it work till now using Composite/Polymorphic Look ups like customer!

It is working perfectly in less than 10 minutes you could clone a record very easily!

Happy Low Code Development!

References:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/model-driven-apps/commanding-use-powerfx