PowerApps : Adding a Spinner

When a Power App needs to process the user will see grey dots floating across the top of the screen. These grey dots are not clear to the user who generally will press buttons. To avoid this confusion a colourful spinner can be displayed to the user while the processing occurs.

To create a spinner, add an image to the screen and select the spinning gif file. If you don’t have a spinning gif file you can search for one on the internet and download a version that you like.

Create a variable (varShowSpinner) to turn the spinner on or off and set the visibility of the image to this variable.

For demonstration purposes I am going to create two buttons to turn the spinner on and off.

The Start Spinner button I set the varShowSpinner variable to true.

The Stop Spinner button I set the varShowSpinner variable to false.

Now lets demo the spinner.

Here is the screen on start up.

Now I start the spinner.

And stop the spinner.

So where I have code that will do processing I can start the spinner before processing and stop the spinner on completion.your spinner.

I advise that you do this to all code even if the processing time seems minimal. Generally you don’t have control over the end users device and it may be old with limited CPU and RAM causing slow processing times than normal. And here is the animation of the Spinner used in the demonstration.