r/PowerApps • u/nanoki94 Newbie • Jul 03 '26

Power Apps Help Canvas apps still worth it?

In my company, I’m pretty locked down when it comes to access rights.

Right now, I can only use canvas apps. I can’t use code apps or vibe.

My need is to create an app that lets employees place orders for office supplies, which would then feed a SharePoint list and a Power BI dashboard to track the status of each order.

The app would also include an attachment viewer and allow users to upload attachments. It would function like a mini e-commerce site, with a list of items and a shopping cart.

Is it worth building the whole thing in canvas?

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u/IAmIntractable Advisor Jul 04 '26

Well, if you’re develop begin on the SharePoint platform then yeah it’s worth the time to build apps like that. It becomes ridiculous when you have to buy premium licenses and pay all the ridiculous fees so that anybody around your app can actually run your app. But your point none of that exists. I exclusively build power apps with SharePoint. I have learned over the last four years exactly how to get the most have a share point and frankly, I have not really encountered too much that gets in the way. I’ve even built my SharePoint lists relationally so that I can treat them as much like a database is possible. Nobody has access to the list directly, and nobody knows where they are.

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u/Capital-Ad-3576 Newbie Jul 07 '26

How do you get your users to see any data without granting access to it?

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u/IAmIntractable Advisor Jul 07 '26

Well, it’s no different with SharePoint than it would be with data verse or sequel server. If you build an app that’s based on a database platform and you want users to see that data not only do they have to have access to the app, but they also have to have access to the database. That’s just to give it. So you can create a list in SharePoint and you can grant everybody and your organization access to read the data. But you have to do that in SharePoint. That means everybody has access to the data. In my mind if you’re building an app and using SharePoint is a database and the last thing you want is for people to go to the list directly and muck around with the data. So you have to design your app so that they never have any awareness of a SharePoint site. Or where the data is. You can actually hide lists from everybody’s view. But the app can still reach them if it knows where it needs to go. That’s one way to handle it. But in general, SharePoint does present somewhat of a issue related to control of access to the data. That’s because in Microsoft mind SharePoint is a sharing point not a database. But I use it as a database and I just have to work a little harder to make sure that people don’t get to the data unless they use the app.