Create a Power Apps where users can specifiy a schduled calls to custom connector

Question

We have created a custom connector, which do the following:-

1. Get all the accounts from external system.
2. Get the account details by passing the Ids returned from step one.

Then inside the Power App >> we need to loop through the returned account info , and do the following:-

1. If the account ID already exists inside a SharePoint list >> to update the account info.
2. If the account ID is new >> to add the account info inside SharePoint list.

This can be done, if the user will manually triggers calling the custom connector, by clicking a button for example. but i need to create a power Apps which will allow the user to do the following:-

1. The user will specify the Refresh rate in minutes. for example to do a call to the custom connector each 150 minutes.
2. Then power Apps will call the custom connector each 150 minutes without nay user intervention >> and updates the SharePoint list accordingly

so is this something we can build using Power Apps? In other word to build something similar to Scheduled Flow inside Power Automate?

Thanks

Answer 1

UPDATE: I was trying to understand the question, turned out that what you're looking for is whether it's possible to create a scheduler/timer inside Power Apps that mimics Power Automate Scheduler Flow, where the user can close the app but the scheduler/timer keeps running in the background.

The straight answer is NO, because it is by design.

Power Apps is designed as the foreground application, the opposite of the background application, that (of course) runs only when the user opens the app and is destroyed when they close it.

When you put a Timer in the Power Apps with interval, the scheduler works as long as the app is running. A similar case is when you build a Windows Desktop app, a web application based on JavaScript, and then you put a timer in it.

In JavaScript, you use setTimeout function. In the Windows Desktop app, you use Timer. The same case for Power Apps, you also have Timer too.

This is where Power Automate comes into the picture. It works as the background application, the same case for Windows Service, where you can trigger based on:

1. a scheduler that runs forever (or as per scheduled) after it started regardless user closes the app or not.
2. based on a trigger, not only from Power Apps, but also when a record is created or modified.

Hope the explanation is clear enough.