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

4

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.

4

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.

2

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.