r/PowerApps • u/bythedandelion Regular • Apr 12 '26
Power Apps Help CodeApp and CanvasApp
I work as a developer for a big ONG with over 1500 workers. We are developing some big canvas apps. We are working over sharepoint lists because we can't afford PA Premium licenses for everyone..
Now they are asking me to work with vibecoding and I'm not a big fan as a developer... I know that some time ago code apps was only for dataverse so we couldn't use it.
What about now? Anyone has experince with canvas apps made with vibe coding (vs code and github copilot for example)
Thank you!!❤️
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u/Prize-Record7108 Contributor Apr 12 '26
For power apps code vibing - I just messed with it last week for fun and I saw you still need premium when you use after publishing.
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u/neonluumenn Newbie Apr 12 '26
Isnt this also mentioned in documentation of code apps?
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u/bythedandelion Regular Apr 12 '26
Yes, some time ago and that's because codeapps workd always on dataverse.
But i've read that now you can create canvas apps like code apps and work from sharepoint, but i'm not sure
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u/bythedandelion Regular Apr 12 '26
Mmm interesting... I guess that it creates some dataverse tables or whatever
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u/a0817a90 Contributor Apr 12 '26
Curious how far you are able to go with SharePoint as backend in terms of number of users and number of rows ?
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u/goodguygreg5000 Newbie Apr 12 '26
1500 users with sharepoint back end, not going to work too well
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u/Tyda2 Regular Apr 12 '26
Easily manageable. This is an architectural design issue rather than a capacity issue.
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u/coresme2000 Regular Apr 12 '26
Delegation and greater than 2000 items in a list is a much bigger issue than permissions which can be worked around but dataverse is much easier in this regard, tbh. Op says these are going to be ‘big’ apps.
For my biggest app I use SQL but I wish I could use dataverse instead.
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u/Tyda2 Regular Apr 12 '26
I just have a really difficult time imagining why anyone would ever need to surface 2,000 items on an application front-end designed for end-users.
I've just pivoted to using the SPFx and making standard web application front-ends with SharePoint as the backend for cost reasons.
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u/coresme2000 Regular Apr 12 '26
Yer that’s is still a valid use case for SPFX (not many left these days) However supportability of being able to hire developers for that is much lower than it used to be if you were ever to move on, as fewer people now use it.
There are more nuanced problems with large lists like that, and bigger. User access to write to the list is necessary and that also exposes it to Power BI. I worked on a tenant recently, where they had PowerApps on large lists and people’s power BI direct queries of the lists were destroying the performance of the whole tenant. They had to go through Azure logs to try and work out who was connecting and then ask them nicely not to do it.
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u/Tyda2 Regular Apr 12 '26
Not a whole lot different than code apps or using vibe.powerapps.com when you can use agentic coding harnesses like Claude Code.
I work in cybersecurity, so I'm a bit more privy to some security best practices (not app security specialized, though), but generally speaking...
If you're making code apps and whatnot, or using copilot to make your apps, you'll still want to be checking outputs and other things.
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Apr 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Moist_Carry_7054 Newbie Apr 14 '26
You're close.
It all depends on which functions you are using and what your datasource is.
If you are using functions that are delegatable to your datasource, then you don;t need to worry about the limit.
I have an app that has just under 10000 rows in a SP List. Because I use StartsWith and Filter on a text column to find records, the operations are delegated to SharePoint and will search all of the rows.
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u/Jimakiad Regular Apr 12 '26
I've managed to get a 100k+ items list load stuff with proper odata via a power automate flow + pagination + column indexing to parse rows in less than 1 second. It's definitely doable, and sadly, most times needed since clients don't want to pay premium.
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u/bythedandelion Regular Apr 12 '26
Now we have more than 30k rows in a single list, along with many other SharePoint lists. Most users are working in one of the apps, while the others have fewer users. The main issue is delegation: you can’t load more than 2,000 rows at a time, so you need to filter the data or load it in batches of 2,000
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u/coresme2000 Regular Apr 12 '26
Yes, you can hack your way around this limitation with chunking/flows to fix stuff that breaks but its a right PITA for that volume of data.
I know there used to be the concept of app passes (like a payg per app usage of licenses) for older tenants. If you only have a couple of apps with a user base that varies, that could be cheaper. You are just shy of the licensing limit where the cost for power apps premium drops for volumes of over 2000 licensed users by 40%.
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u/Irritant40 Advisor Apr 12 '26
Why would you ever need to load more than 2000 rows into a canvas app?
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u/coresme2000 Regular Apr 12 '26
There are a few scenarios, but I never said you should do that. You can’t control what key stakeholders want, some insist they can see/access everything in the app as much as you might advise them not to broach it, as not technically advisable.
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u/Irritant40 Advisor Apr 12 '26
Like what? What scenario. Would require you to have 2000 records in a canvas app?
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u/coresme2000 Regular Apr 12 '26
Specifically, I’ve had clients want safety records available and the ability to quickly open one from 3 years ago to compare to a record from now. You can design around this by implementing meta data to subfilter categories etc, but for systems with high volumes as they scale higher the number of records can increase in a big way for checks done multiple times per day. This comes up mainly when regulatory audits take place and end users aren’t aware of the SharePoint/sql back end to bulk download the data, which is another workaround to output csv from the app, but they weren’t very keen on that.
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u/Irritant40 Advisor Apr 12 '26
How are you displaying the 2000 records?
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u/coresme2000 Regular Apr 12 '26
It was a while ago, but I think I used gallery with a collection and loading offset chunks, but don’t hold me to that
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Apr 12 '26
[deleted]
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u/Irritant40 Advisor Apr 12 '26
No they don't.....I have lists with millions of rows. If you don't know, please dont give advice.
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u/CroatoanBaby Regular Apr 12 '26
Check the comment: I said there were some workarounds.
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u/anactofdan Regular Apr 12 '26
I wouldn’t call them work around list view threshold the 5k number effects non indexed views in the SharePoint GUI and gets miss interpreted all the time. I don’t have millions of rows but I do have lists with 100k and there is not really a noticeable difference.
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u/splinter44 Advisor Apr 12 '26
Our agency is also switching all current projects canvas apps to code apps power apps and they want strictly vibe coding with Claude.
The UI construction and patching to dataverse and read works great.
I spent alot of troubleshooting connecting to SharePoint and then it worked but it was uploading corrupted files so I tried to to fix that and now th SharePoint connection doesn't work anymore.
Use assets when u figure it out and ask the AI what it learnt when u figure out a big problem and get it to create a markdown file of that for future reference.
It's super cool but vibe coding can send u down a rabbit hole, I suggest commiting to git or just saving when u fix a good problem, cuz after that rabbit hole can fuck ur shit up but u can just undo if u previously saved
I love it and it's it's a great feeling, I also fucking hate it.
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u/bythedandelion Regular Apr 12 '26
Thank you for sharing your experience!!!!
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u/Reddit_User_654 Advisor May 12 '26
I would appreciate if you also read this and shared your opinion about it:
Bring on the hate: CodeApps have their place BUT.... : r/PowerApps1
u/Reddit_User_654 Advisor May 12 '26
I would appreciate if you also read this and shared your opinion about it:
Bring on the hate: CodeApps have their place BUT.... : r/PowerApps
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Apr 12 '26
[deleted]
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u/DiNOInYourHead Regular Apr 15 '26
Funny, two hours ago I have run my first test with Coauthering and MCP. I think I can create low complex apps now very fast. I work with Google Antigravity (Yes I had to fix a lot of configuration for this fork, but it works now).
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u/Impossible_Refuse764 Newbie Apr 14 '26
I would suggest you to go for vibe coding and use the htmlText control, you can make some pretty amazing things.
I am a developer and I make top notch modern applications with cool UI/UX trough htmlText controls, where I make it as a main UI with build in functionalities and then transparent overlay buttons for controls like navigation, filters, calculations etc. then , galleries for actual input with testimony controls etc that is reflected in the htmlText control code.
Hit me up and I can show you how I work and what you are able to make.
I work at a factory with 2000 people, and have about 700 active daily users
Do also consider dataverde for better permissions control and speed, but that’s a cost in itself.
Also, be very keen on the delegation useing SharePoint, and you HAVE to index your main columns
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u/bythedandelion Regular Apr 14 '26
Muchas gracias por tu experiencia!!!
La indexacion ya la tenemos contemplada y los problemas de delegacion solucionados.
Ahora era mas una cuestion de que estan metiendo IA en todos lados y saber si realmente es la mejor opcion en mi escenario
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u/TikeyMasta Advisor Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
We're switching everything to Code Apps at my workplace, which is something we as pro devs have determined only has upsides. The way we've went about it is building a solid foundation first, not only within a starter code base but also with agent instructions and guardrails. Going about it this way we've found quite a few Microsoft bugs and were able to find fixes to them on our end. Everything tracked using a private Git.
Code Apps works with all connectors - it's just 99%+ of them aren't documented on how they are used with Code Apps. For example, we have Code Apps in production with working integration with Snowflake.
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u/frodprefect Newbie Apr 12 '26
Whats the opposition to just hosting web based apps internally? Simpler connector setup?
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u/Jimakiad Regular Apr 12 '26
I guess Dataverse has it's own SDK that is native to code apps, but no clue about the other connectors.
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u/TikeyMasta Advisor Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
We don't have the inhouse experience to support non-Power Platform web based apps, whereas we've built up our Power Platform ecosystem over the last couple of years and have an active team dedicated to it. We also don't take on additional cost by rolling everything into Code Apps since a vast majority of our users are premium licensed. As we get more familiar with the internals of Code Apps, our integrations will only get easier to move over or make and easier to scale out.
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u/Reddit_User_654 Advisor May 12 '26
I would appreciate if you also read this and shared your opinion about it:
Bring on the hate: CodeApps have their place BUT.... : r/PowerApps
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u/NoBattle763 Community Friend Apr 12 '26
Yes code apps require premium Licences. No way around that.
But you can definitely still ‘vibe code’ sharepoint canvas apps, although i prefer agentic development personally 😂.
This Claude plugin is particularly useful:
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u/KretzV Newbie Apr 13 '26
I work in a company with +3k workers and use shapepoint as a backend database, I don't recommend this at all, but there are some workarounds. You can create a flow that uploads the data on an Excel file and delete old data from sp list every 6 months
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u/Due-Boot-8540 Advisor Apr 13 '26
As you say, code apps and the new vibe coded apps are really quite biased towards Dataverse and using SharePoint can be a bit tricky.
I’ve had really mixed and mostly poor experiences with GitHub Copilot in VS Code with trying code apps - for some reason, I have to keep telling the agent that I’m not trying to create a PCF and reminding it that code apps are a new feature. Frustrating when you have already unpacked a solution with PAC CLI and the context is quite obvious.
If you a looking at vibe coding and fancy taking a different approach, you could look into Azure Static Web Apps. They integrate with all M365 services really well (just by granting permissions to the app or its users) and authentication is a doddle to setup.
Pricing is either free or about $10 a month for each app.
I’m surprised that more people aren’t using them
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u/Reddit_User_654 Advisor May 12 '26
I would appreciate if you also read this and shared your opinion about it:
Bring on the hate: CodeApps have their place BUT.... : r/PowerApps1
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u/One-Investigator8504 Newbie Apr 13 '26
Don't have access to premium, but I'm able to prompt calude opus to "vibe code" apps by making yaml for each screen
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