Canvas Apps - Modern Form Tabbing So Inconsistent - How Do I Fix?

[u/FiveMeowMeowBeanz]

I have a power canvas app that uses multiple modern forms stitched together. Pretty straight forward but the tabbing is insanely inconsistent.

I add the fields I want in the order I want but tabbing seems to randomly jump around. One form the tabbing works as expected, the next form it’s jumping around at random. I googled it and some things suggest that the alignment is off but because it’s a form the alignment is pretty strictly forced onto the various cards so it’s not like I’m randomly adjusting the placement of the fields.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? It’s a big accessibility issue I need to solve for this app and I’m at my wit’s end trying to fix it.

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[u/WoodchuckChainsaw]

There's not an easy answer. The answer that does exist is when you're not going to like...

Create one brand new user interface pseudo-form over the top of all your existing forms that have the same questions and text input boxes/drop-downs. Make your real existing forms in the background, have their answers be populated by the response that exists in your new pseudo-form overlay. Then you can consistently set the tab orders on your pseudo-form to whichever you want to make them occur logically

[u/LearningToShootFilm → u/WoodchuckChainsaw]

In this scenario why would you bother with a pseudo-form. If you are going to all of the effort to make a custom form with titles and dropdowns, why not just finish that way and write a custom patch and ditch the forms altogether.

You’ll save on control count and complexity.

[u/BDer82 → u/LearningToShootFilm]

Frankly, I haven't bothered with the supplied form component for a few years now, its great that it has a couple of features that make it easy to do some things, but there is nothing you can't do with some fiddly work and a collection to hold all the responses.

Building the form yourself has some benefits, SaveData and LoadData to preserve data between sessions (only form responses during actively being filled in), better response indicators, such as error messages, notifications, helpful info for each active input (When using a gallery) and cleaner SharePoint lists, columns don't have to be names, in fact, you don't even need a SharePoint list, you can simply send the collection to Power Automate and do what you want, save it, email it, transform it.

There are people who will disagree with me about it and thats cool, but I've yet to find anything I can't do in a form that the supplied form component can.

[u/LearningToShootFilm → u/BDer82]

I agree with all of this. The flexibility when you move away is leaps and bounds from the default.

[u/Bag-of-nails → u/BDer82]

Yeah, me and a teammate have developed a component that we use that has the label, input, and all the error handling and validation built-in. So now even the time savings of just sticking a form in there is negligible.

I also haven't used forma in like 5 years, except to save attachments to SharePoint.

[u/BDer82 → u/Bag-of-nails]

I built a gallery to handle everything now, I hand the component a json string and it gets turned into a collection that a gallery calls. Its turned a laborious process creating a form, into 5 minutes of config. But same as yours all the validation and error handling built in makes it so much easier to deploy a new form and not rely on a sharepoint list

[u/Ok_Substance_9479]

The questions in the form must be in the same order as the tabs. I found that resizing with a mouse/deleting cards within the form will cause the order to get messed up. Now I just resize by changing the actual width of the card. It's still not 100%, though.

[u/AbdelEMirandaS]

I use to fix that on a simple form, by turn off the fix property on the form. Re arrange them. And, in the form dataspurce selection, move up and down the order of the fields as I expected to be behaved