How To secure Power Apps using text input validation

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In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, ensuring the security of applications is paramount. User input validation is a critical aspect of application security, serving as the first line of defense against various cyber threats. In Power Apps, robust input validation not only enhances user experience but also protects against severe security vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS).

While you can use Dataverse business rules to ensure business rules are validated before data is stored, there is a need to validate from more than just business requirements. Power Apps provides the IsMatch function, which allows developers to use regular expressions (Regex) to validate user input. This function helps ensure that the data entered by users meets the required format and standards before it is processed or stored.

Here are some examples on how you can use IsMatch function

1 - Allows Email Address

IsMatch(TextInput1.Text, Match.Email)

2 - Allows letters, numbers, space, full stop and comma only (can be used in a comment text input field)

IsMatch(TextInput1.Text, "^[a-zA-Z0-9., ]+$")

3 - Allows input in US Zip Code format (checks format only and not existence of the actual zip code, for which you need to use external library or API from USPS)

IsMatch(TextInput1.Text, "^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$")

4 - Full name validation, i.e., first name and last name (covers most common scenarios but needs to be customized for cultural variations for your intended audience)

IsMatch(TextInput1.Text, "^([A-Z][a-z]*(?:-[A-Z][a-z]*)?)(?:\s([A-Z][a-z]*(?:-[A-Z][a-z]*)?))?$")

Please add your own user input validation examples in the comments! 😊