Formulas: Notify timeout and Exit sign out

Happy Friday!  Some more small features for Power Apps canvas formulas.

Notify timeout

My this function has evolved.  Originally named ShowError and focused on errors, we honestly didn’t think too hard about it so long as it would stay up long enough for an error to be easily noticed and read.  We later changed the focus and name to the more generic Notify but left the 30 second timeout.  You let us know that this is an eternity in some cases and not long enough in others.

So, we have added a new argument to the Notify function to control how long the banner appears, settable from 1 millisecond to infinity.  We also trimmed the default to a more natural 10 seconds.

Exit sign out

One of the requirements for the COVID-19 Hospital Emergency Response solution was to make it easy to sign out.  Devices are shared among health care workers, transitions are very quick and on the fly, and unless we made it super easy it may not happen.

Fortunately, we already had a partial solution implemented that had never been documented.  We finished it off by making it work in the web player and updated the Exit function documentation.   It’s super simple: Exit now takes an optional Boolean argument to sign out the current user upon exit, defaulting to not sign out (today’s behavior).