I have been learning how to build Power Platform Canvas apps and have some things I would like to share. 

I have a client that has a need for a model-driven-like view inside a canvas page. After poking around, I found the Powercat Creator Kit contains a "DetailsList" control which is about as close to the user experience of a view (sort/filter/drill down) in model driven app as I have found to date. Releases · microsoft/powercat-creator-kit

First, thanks to Scott Durow (https://www.youtube.com/scottdurow) for making some nice videos on the topic - highly recommend. 

My use-case is a bit complex, but here is my cut-down version: I have several tables in Dataverse that I needed to do some fancy join logic to get the right values, so I decided to use Power Automate and custom FetchXML on Dataverse to get my data into a collection in my Canvas Page (story for another day). I need to present the user with the data as a view and let them click on selected cells to pass to another process. The DetailsList has the ability to format selected columns as "links" where I can customize the behavior when a user clicks on it. 

My collection has text and many columns of numbers that range from 0-15 with up to 3 decimal places. The client wants to see the numbers with all 3 decimal places and right justified. The only way to do that (that I have found so far) is to convert the displayed data using the Right("_" & Text(,"#0.000"),6) function, however, that breaks the OOTB column sorting feature in DetailsList, because it sees the column values as text, so numeric values appear to sort lexicographically (e.g., “1”, “10”, “2”, “20”) rather than numerically (and still left justified because the string appears trimmed).

My workaround is to add a 'formatted' column (using the above expression) for each numeric column. For example, if I have a numeric column name of "ecc_25", then I will do this:

AddColumns( collection, ecc_25_formatted, Right("_" & Text(ecc_25,"#0.000"),6)) 

So now there is one numeric column in the collection that can be sorted correctly, and a formatted version that I added to the fields of the DetailsList control. In my case, all my values are a links, so they appear to be underlined when rendered, and my "_" prefix is not obvious to the user.

Then in the DetailsList OnChange event I have this:

If(

    Self.EventName = "Sort",

    UpdateContext(

        {

            ctxSortCol: If(("formatted" in Self.SortEventColumn), Left(Self.SortEventColumn,6), Self.SortEventColumn),

            ctxSortAsc: If(

                Self.SortEventDirection = 'PowerCAT.FluentDetailsList.SortEventDirection'.Ascending,

                false

                ,true

            )

        }

    )

);

Note the ctxSortCol is expecting the name of the sorting column as a string, so I trim off the "_formatted" part of the column name and the DetailsList will take care of the sorting correctly.

I posted a feature request in Github for them to add a Text format property added to each column (defined in columns_Items) and a Justification property (left/right/center). If you like this idea, please add your comments DetailsList column sorts formatted numeric values lexicographically: workaround + feature request · Issue #389 · microsoft/powercat-code-components