Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Wondering if I bit off more than I can chew…

Old DB to PowerApps?

I have an old (pre-windows 95 works in DOS) application (open-access - pre access) that is mostly broken, but still used everyday by about 10 users (half have premium O365, half have standard O365). I’ve been tasked with rebuilding it. We use O365 and have a few SP PowerApps that work great.

I’ve managed to get all the data from the old app and have it in excel files. As each of these 22 databases are uniquely different I created different sharepointlists for them in the same sharepoint site. I built an app with the main screen and the bulk of the data visible and editable in a format that everyone seems to enjoy.

The current application has dozens of tables that post and write data. For instance, the main screen for quotes pulls data and writes data to roughly 4-6 DBs given the screen. Each table is unique. One table has company names and the key contacts, another table has weight information, others have historical data about parts etc. etc etc etc.

The purposed app rewrite is mostly data entry and data review with the ability to get a PDF when the user wants. But I am having difficulty getting any of these screens to pull or write data to other SP lists.

Is PowerApps (without dataverse) an option here? Understanding the dataverse licensing is overly complicated and on face value seems overly expensive. Is it possible to have a single gallery connected to multiple SP lists? How do I go about connecting different sharepoint lists into the same gallery/container (fields from sp list 1,3&7 in the same form? Any recommended videos to watch?

Thanks in advance!

Categories:

Building Power Apps

To get data from multiple SharePoint Lists displaying in a single gallery, you will need to use some sort of table-shaping function such as a ForAll() or AddColumns() with a LookUp() or other formula to combine the data from two or more tables into a single table for the gallery. It can be very slow to do this because none of those are delegable. It can go easier if the lists are loaded into collections near app startup and you don't need to work with the source lists much.

You're going to find that you will be fighting with many things that a relational database (such as Dataverse) makes very easy. If your schema is more than 2 relationships deep, strongly consider a relational database. Yes, there is licencing cost, but your app will likely run faster and your development cost could be a lot less. Especially at the 10 user level.

Hope that helps,

Bryan