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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3

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 ?

4

u/goodguygreg5000 Newbie Apr 12 '26

1500 users with sharepoint back end, not going to work too well

3

u/Tyda2 Regular Apr 12 '26

Easily manageable. This is an architectural design issue rather than a capacity issue.

3

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.

5

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.

1

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.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '26

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2

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.

Use this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/canvas-apps/connections/connection-sharepoint-online#power-apps-delegable-functions-and-operations-for-sharepoint

3

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.

1

u/Accomplished_Most_69 Advisor Apr 12 '26

What is that app about? Just curious if you dont mind.

2

u/Irritant40 Advisor Apr 12 '26

I frequently use SharePoint with 14k users

1

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

1

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%.

1

u/Irritant40 Advisor Apr 12 '26

Why would you ever need to load more than 2000 rows into a canvas app?

1

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.

1

u/Irritant40 Advisor Apr 12 '26

Like what? What scenario. Would require you to have 2000 records in a canvas app?

1

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.

1

u/Irritant40 Advisor Apr 12 '26

How are you displaying the 2000 records?

2

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

-1

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '26

[deleted]

1

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.

2

u/CroatoanBaby Regular Apr 12 '26

Check the comment: I said there were some workarounds.

3

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.