Adventures with Power Apps: Working with Attachments and Notes

I have a Dataverse table for capturing board games with attachments enabled.📎

I wanted to create a Canvas App that displayed the board games and any notes and attachments that were available.

Pretty straight forward. ✔️

When it came to editing a board game, I wanted to display a list of the notes and if there was an attachment, allow the user to download the attachment.

I added a Gallery and set the Items property to the Notes property of the selected board game.

For the Item Template for the Gallery, I added a Container and withing the Container three controls, two Text fields and an HTML Text field.

• Set Text field Text property to "Modified on " & ThisItem.'Modified On'& " by " & ThisItem.'Modified By'.'Full Name'.
• Set Html Text field Text property to ThisItem.Description.
• Set Text field Text property to ThisItem.'File Name'.

Gallery done, looking good!

The challenge came when I wanted to allow the user to download the file. 😕

There didn’t seem anything I could do in line with PowerFX, and I didn’t want to use the Attachments control like others suggested.

I opted for creating a flow.

My flow would take the unique identifier of the Note as parameter, get the Note, then create a file along with sharing link that could be passed back to the Power Apps.

As usually there was one gotcha. 😩

In the Create file action I needed to set the File Content property to base64ToBinary(outputs('Get_a_row_by_ID_-_Notes')?['body/documentbody']). 😀

I added the flow to my Canvas App.

I set the OnSelect property of the Text control that displayed the File Name to the following:

Set(VarResult, 'BoardGameNerdAttachmentDownload(Instant)Flow'.Run(ThisItem.Note));
Launch(VarResult.web_url);

The first line calls the Flow, passing the unique identifier of the Note. After the call is completed, the second line opens up the returned link in a new browser window.

When I clicked on the File Name it downloaded the attachment! 🥳

Mission accomplished!

Download the complete solution at https://mattruma.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/BoardGameNerdSolution_1_0_0_1.zip.